Serial Sunday: Murder in Hackney, Part I

By Paul Leone.

“Quia anima carnis in sanguine est,” Cat murmured as she looked down on the flesh and blood that had once been a living soul.

“And therefore I said unto the children of Israel see that no soul of you eat blood nor yet any stranger that sojourneth among ye,” Keziah answered without hesitation. From the looks of it, this particular commandment had been kept, if not the more basic one ‘Thou shalt not kill’.

“Who is our dearly departed?” Cat asked.

“It’s Charlie Mortimer,” Keziah said before any of the constables gathered around the body could answer.

“You know him?”

“Everyone in Hackney knows Old Charlie, ma’am,” Constable Murdock said.

“Then please do fill in the lamentable gap in my local knowledge.”

“He’s a street preacher,” Keziah said. “Or he was,” she amended after a glance down at the still-warm body.

Cat looked down again. In addition to being a preacher before he had been impacted by several pieces of lead, Mortimer had been a man straddling the border between middle-aged and old, his hard features – leathery, liver-spotted skin, old scars on his calloused hands, thin grey hair and a beard in irregular patches like poorly mowed grass – making it likely he was around 50 by the birth certificate and 65 by the life lived. The life endured, rather. He was dressed in a shabby imitation of clerical garb, a too-large black shirt with two buttons missing and an ill-fitting Roman collar fixed to it with safety pins. The shirt collar had been turned up in lieu of a proper cleric’s top. His trousers were faded denim worn thin in a few places, much like his loafers with their peeling heels.

He was lying on his back, more or less, his narrowed, unblinking eyes staring up at the late night sky. Up above, it was slate grey, no moon, no stars, just the ugly reflected glow of the city lights.

Cat shook her head and exhaled away the idea of that being one’s last sight this side of eternity – whatever that was.

He’d been shot three times from the looks of it. Cat guessed the holes in his chest were the entry wounds, but she wouldn’t have bet any money on that. He could have been running away, or he could have been taken in the back by surprise and then turned around before falling over onto the exit wounds. She almost smiled as she remembered one particular case early in her career where a drug dealer named David Prince had been shot twice in the back and spun around, returning fire at his attacker, a rival dealer from a Minsker gang, before taking a shot to the head at the same time he scored a lethal shot of his own. It was the only case Cat could recall where two killers had cooperated to so neatly tie up all the loose ends for her.

“It could be someone took offense to his spreading the good news,” Keziah added.

Cat wouldn’t have been surprised. Hoxton wasn’t fertile ground for the Gospel, in her opinion. There were worse neighbourhoods in London, but not many. And this was an especially ragged section of Hoxton, one where every third building was empty, where unemployment hadn’t been below double digits in Cat’s lifetime, and where the old Coptic hash growers had long since been driven out by hard men with hard drugs.

“How long has he been at that particular vocation?”

Keziah looked at Murdock, who was almost as old as Charlie had been. The constable shrugged. “About ten years, ma’am? He used to work in the docks up north, I think. Hull, maybe. He was a northerner of some sort, at least.”

Keziah nodded. “We pulled him in once or twice when I was in Iniquity. He sometimes got in rows with the local pimps, at least until we took away his old cane. It was a sword cane, an old one.”

“He couldn’t find a new one?” They were illegal now but that rarely stopped the truly determined.

“Couldn’t afford it,” Keziah said.

Cat looked down at Mortimer again for a moment before likewise shaking her head. “And what particular breed of church fox was our late preacher?”

It could have been nearly anything. In London, there were Lutherans, Henricians, Tyndalers, Elizabethans, Covenanters, Reformed Covenanters, Fishers, Harveyites, and more — a veritable Babel of Protestants. And that wasn’t counting the bewildering variety of nonconformities begat at home and abroad in the last century or so. All in all, it made Cat’s head swim.

“Bin Yeshua,” Keziah said. “Last I’d heard, at least.”

“I’ve never even heard of them,” Cat said. “Are they respectable?”

Keziah silently counted to three before answering. “They’re new. Local, too.”

“I see. Well, it’s worth looking into,” Cat said. “Professionally speaking, of course.”

Keziah shook her head. She studied the area or at least as much as could be seen on a dark, misty night a few hours before dawn. To their left was a new flat under construction, halfway complete, the metal framework reflecting the flashing green lights of the patrol cars. To their right, an abandoned store of some sort, the windows long since broken in the eternal fashion of the more ragged sections of London. Across the street were a pair of warehouses with more broken windows, a couple of rough looking black-and-brick houses, and a vacant, brick-strewn lot with a faded, crooked sign promising re-development that had never quite manifested. Promises deferred was Hackney’s story in brief after England’s industrial muscle had atrophied over the last few generations.

“Did he say anything when you found him?” Cat asked Constable Kavanagh, the responding officer.

The young constable shook her head. “Ní hea. He’d already bled out by the time we’d gotten here. Might’ve done with the crowd, though,” she said, gesturing at the constabulary van full of a half-dozen sullen Hoxtonites. The van formed one vertex of a triangle of automotive constabulary. The two patrol cars at the scene formed another and Cat and Keziah’s unmarked sedan the third. “If anybody was out to look, ní chonaic mé – I mean, I didn’t see it.”

She added something under her breath, probably not complimentary to the King’s English. Cat smirked and Keziah stared blankly.

To Keziah, at least, the Irish constable was something of an enigma. Her lilting accent and the Gaelic peppering her speech both spoke to her Irish origins, but the fact that she was a constable, emphatically not a vocation generally pursued by the local Irish, was a little bewildering. She didn’t ‘look Irish’ to Keziah, either, at least not as much as the redheaded Cat.

“But the lights in that second house were on the whole time,” she added in a low voice.

“Witnesses,” Keziah said in an equally hushed voice that reminded Cat of the murmurs of a priest at mass. The older detective refrained from grinning. Keziah would inevitably demand an explanation and just as inevitably wouldn’t appreciate the comparison.

“Perhaps,” Cat said. “I’ll go and see what the occupants have to say while we wait for the medical examiners to grace us with their presence.”

Keziah nodded and turned back to the crime scene, such as it was. She moved closer to the wall behind the late Preacher Mortimer and ran her hands just above the pitted old brick until she found holes too deep and fresh to be the result of even a century and a half of weathering. Keziah shone an electric torch into one hole and saw a dull metal shape there – a bullet. Just a foot to the right and a few inches up was another hole, another bullet.

She looked back down at the victim, who had fallen just a few feet away from the wall, then ventured across the street in the direction of the nearest warehouse, shining her torch in a back-and-forth pattern until she spotted another metallic gleam, this one much shinier. There was a shell casing lying in the mud and grime of the shallow channel that led from a gutter downspout to the storm drain. Keziah squatted next to it and carefully studied the channel and the pavement around it. There was just the one shell casing to be found. The others – and there could’ve been many more than three, depending on how inaccurate the shooter was – must have washed down into the drain. They could be halfway to Woolwich by now.

Keziah shifted and pointed across the street at the body and the constables standing over it, looking back at her with amused expressions. Keziah ignored them and pondered. She was about twenty-five feet from Mortimer now. It wouldn’t take too much skill to make three shots at this distance, especially against an old man who was not, by all appearances, armed or otherwise able to fight back. She’d hit targets ten times as far away during her service, albeit under vastly different circumstances. For one thing, she’d used a rifle, not a pistol.

Flashing lights to the side caught Keziah’s attention. She glanced down the street and saw the medical examiner’s van finally making its appearance. More locals were appearing, too, drifting over in twos and threes. Mostly young, almost entirely men. Keziah’s fingers flexed around a non-existent rifle grip. She took a few deep breaths that didn’t entirely calm her down. It was enough.

She hoped.

“Oyez, oyez, what’s all this?”

Keziah turned and grimaced as she recognized the short, pot-bellied man coming up on a wobbly bicycle. Agenor Trotter, the biggest pain in the arse in Londonshire. He was chief reporter, editor and owner of The Hackney Free Herald, a mud-slinging weekly magazine that somehow survived because it aggravated everyone in equal measure instead of consistently alienating any given person or group. And if you were the target one week, you could be sure the Herald would be poking your least favourite people in the eye in the next issue.

Trotter skidded to a halt and fixed his beady eyes on Keziah. “Detective Constable Carter! Oyez! What’s the story? Is that Charlie Mortimer dead in a ditch?” he called out, his voice carrying halfway down the block in all directions.

“Back up,” Keziah said, fingers curled around her belt near her baton and stun gun. “Don’t enter the scene. You know the rules, Trotter.”

She glared and he grinned.

“It is Preacher Charlie!” Trotter said as he inched backwards a quarter rotation of the bike’s tyres.

“Trotter, I’m warning you,” Keziah growled.

Something in her voice or her expression got through to him. Seeing Keziah was serious, he backed away more energetically, putting a good yard between him and the detective. “There, I’m a good lad. Now spill.”

Keziah smirked as she quoted the code. “All constabulary communications come from the Office of Disclosure and all queries go to the said office.”

“Come on, luv! Give a man a break.”

“You’re not asking me to break constabulary policy, are you, Trotter?”

Trotter exhaled sharply. “Fine, fine.”

Just then, it began to rain, and not just in a literal sense. Cat came over, her phone in hand and a look of exquisite annoyance on her face.

“What’s wrong?” Keziah asked in a low voice.

“I’ve been called off for another case,” Cat answered after a few seconds. “You’ll have to handle this one on your own, I’m afraid.”

“What?”

“Was I unclear?”

“What other case?” Keziah asked, more curious about Cat’s annoyance than anything else. It wasn’t exactly common for two people to get murdered in the same night, but it did happen.

“Some nonsense straight from the Tower,” Cat said, making it both clearer and more confusing. She smiled crookedly. “When the Senior Chief Constable calls and says jump, what can you say but ‘How many times?’”

“You could say ‘How high?’”

Cat laughed. “It’s Sir Avery. ‘As high as you can’ goes without saying.”

Keziah nodded. “Well, good luck, then...”

Cat smirked and headed back to their car. Keziah watched her go and then realized she was now stranded in Hoxton. The younger detective rolled her eyes and turned back to the other constables. Judging by their expressions, they’d come to the same revelation. Fortunately, perhaps, the medical examiner’s assistants unloaded their gurney just then.

Keziah took a few more pictures of the dead preacher and the scene around him. She took special care with the photos of the bullet holes, making sure to capture them in relation to Mortimer’s body as well as in enough magnification to show the bullets resting in the battered bricks.

A few minutes later, she accepted a large plastic evidence bag containing the contents of the preacher’s pockets: an expired ID card attached to a handful of crumpled sovereign notes with a paperclip and a battered old metal cigarette case with a bit of Scripture carved on it: Ut in nomine Jesu omne genu flectatur caelestium, terrestrium et infernorum.

It only took Keziah a few seconds to recall the passage. It was Philippians 2:9: ‘That in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those that are in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.’

“Amen,” she said before putting the cigarette case back in the bag and handing it over to Constable Murdock.

“Is he ready?” one of the assistants asked Keziah.

Keziah looked at the body. The man. She and Cat and the constables had studied and measured and photographed the dead preacher.

Bring him in out of the rain, Keziah’s conscience said. It often spoke at moments like this. Do that, if nothing else.

“Yes, he’s ready,” she told the assistant. “Take him away.”

The man nodded back and he and his partner lifted the body up, putting it first into a black bag and then placing that on the gurney. Then they loaded the mortal remains of Charles Benjamin Mortimer into the van and drove off, just as the constabulary van with its considerably noisier occupants had while Cat and Keziah were working the scene.

“What now, then?” Kavanagh asked after a moment.

“Now we’ll have a word with the potential witnesses.”

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Paul Leone is an author who, among other works, wrote the book In and Out of the Reich for Sea Lion.