I unbolted the door. The carpenter’s wife barely came up to my elbow but what she lacked in inches she more than made up with force of character. She pushed past me into Alderley’s lobby. She glared at me, her hands on her hips. To all intents and purposes, she felt herself mistress of the situation.
‘And who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What are you doing, poking around where you’ve no reason to be? Is there any reason I shouldn’t call the constable?’
I showed her my warrant, which she read attentively.
‘It doesn’t say in black and white that you can come into my house,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Not in so many words. But I suppose it’s all right. You’d think Bearwood was born yesterday. He’s as innocent as a newborn baby, and just as stupid. I’m sorry, master, but you could have been anyone.’
‘No bones broken, Mistress Bearwood.’
But she wouldn’t let it go. ‘I could have found you stripping the house bare, and him and the boy none the wiser. (Takes after his father, Hal does, more’s the pity.) He can’t even read properly, so your warrant made no more sense to him than Sunday’s sermon.’ She looked me up and down with an unflattering lack of interest, and then shifted her ground slightly to get a better view of the damage that the fire had done to my face. ‘And you don’t exactly look like a courtier, neither.’
‘That’s because I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m a clerk at Whitehall. But I’m glad you’re here, mistress, because I want to ask you some questions.’
For a moment it hung in the balance: her anger – with me, with her husband, with the whole world, perhaps – struggled with the suspicion that it would be foolish to offend me if I was really who I said I was.
‘When did you last see Mr Alderley?’ I asked.
‘It’s not our place to blab about him.’
‘It’s not your place to disobey the King, either. And I promise you, on my honour, nothing you can tell me will in any way harm Mr Alderley.’
She stared up at me with black button eyes. ‘Saturday evening,’ she said. ‘He’d been home most of the day but he went out around eight o’clock.’
‘Was that usual?’
She shrugged. ‘He stays out all night sometimes, if he has a mind to. Or he lies abed all day. Or he’s up with the lark. Nothing to do with me. I’ve got work to do, sir, and—’
I cut her off with a wave of my hand. ‘Have you known him long?’ I asked.
‘Nigh on eighteen months. He rents out the shop and ground floor to us. He don’t have a servant, so I keep his apartments clean and send out the boy for his dinner or whatever he wants.’ She paused, and I had the sense that she was making lightning calculations behind those round black eyes. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I knew him last year when he lived in Barnabas Place.’ Where he attacked Cat Lovett and raped her on her own bed. ‘Does he have any visitors?’
Mrs Bearwood shook her head. ‘Only the Bishop.’
‘The Bishop?’ Amazed, I stared at her. ‘The Bishop of London?’
‘No, sir.’ She looked pityingly at me. ‘It’s just a nickname. He’s one of Mr Alderley’s friends. If you’re such a friend of his too, you—’
‘I’m not a friend of Mr Alderley’s. I’m acquainted with him. When was this bishop last here?’
‘Friday,’ she said. ‘He brought Mr Alderley home.’ She sniffed. ‘Mr Alderley was in liquor again. He could hardly stand. He could talk all right, more or less, but his legs wouldn’t work. Bearwood and the Bishop had a terrible time getting him up the stairs.’
I threw in another question without much hope of an answer. ‘Do you know where this man lives?’
Mrs Bearwood was edging away from me, tired of my interrogation. ‘I don’t know. Watford, maybe?’
‘Watford? Outside London? Why do you think that?’
‘Because Mr Alderley opened the window and called down to the Bishop as he was leaving. He bellowed like a bull – I even heard him in the kitchen, and the window was shut – and he mentioned Watford. Maybe the Bishop was a preacher, though he didn’t look like one, not with a sword at his side.’
‘A preacher?’ I said, feeling as if I were drowning.
‘Well, perhaps. It’s just that Mr Alderley shouted something about “When you get to Watford, be sure to tell them about Jerusalem.”’
‘Jerusalem?’ I repeated.
‘Jerusalem. As I hope to be saved.’
ON MY WAY to Whitehall, I was tempted to call at Henrietta Street and warn Cat Lovett of what had happened to her cousin. But prudence prevailed. I didn’t want to risk advertising the connection between us. Besides, I was in a hurry to make my report.
They were the excuses I made for myself. Really, though, I was mortally afraid that she might already know of Edward Alderley’s death, that she had known ever since the moment it happened. The words she had said two days ago in the New Exchange haunted my memory: ‘I wish I had killed him.’
I ran into Mr Williamson when I returned to Whitehall – almost literally, for he was coming out of the Court Gate into the street as I was going in. I had to jump aside to avoid colliding with him.
‘Marwood,’ he snapped. ‘When will you be back?’
‘I’m not sure, sir. When the King and Mr Chiffinch—’
‘How can I be expected to carry on the business of the Gazette without your assistance?’ Irritation had scraped away the polish that Oxford and London had given Williamson’s voice, revealing the uncompromising vowels of his northern upbringing. ‘I have my own responsibilities, as you know, without troubling myself with those damned women of yours.’
It took me a moment to realize that he meant the women who trudged the streets of London with bundles of the Gazette. I had pushed the problems with our distribution network so far into the back of my mind that I had almost forgotten they were there.
‘For reasons I don’t understand,’ he went on, warming himself at the fire of his own eloquence, ‘the day-to-day conduct of the newspaper seems impossible without you, as well as other routine tasks in my office. Why this should be, I cannot tell. It is insupportable that Mr Chiffinch should have you at his beck and call whenever he wishes, disrupting the work of my department. I shall take steps to remedy it. But, in the meantime, I require your presence in Scotland Yard as soon as possible.’
I bowed. ‘Yes, sir. Believe me, I wish it myself.’
He sniffed, gave me a curt nod and swept out into the street to hail a hackney.
I made my way to the Matted Gallery. There was a door from here that led to the King’s Backstairs, the province of Mr Chiffinch. I asked one of the guards to send word to him that I was here and hoped to speak to him.
While I waited, I studied the picture of the Italian widow again, and decided that she looked nothing like Lady Quincy. But I did not want to run the risk of Chiffinch finding me in front of the painting, so I walked up and down for a quarter of an hour until a servant approached me. He conducted me to the gloomy chamber off the Backstairs where Chiffinch and I had met once before, earlier in the year. The small window was barred and had a view of the river. The rain was beating against the glass and the room smelled of sewage. It