The Business of Blood Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Kerrigan Byrne

  All Rights Reserved

  www.kerriganbyrne.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover by: Quirky Bird

  Interior: Kim Loraine

  https://www.kimloraineauthor.com/

  Editor: Chelle Olson

  http://www.literallyaddictedtodetail.com/

  Pin Board:

  https://www.pinterest.com/kerbyrne/fiona-mahoney-mysteries/

  To you, who thrived in a world that was not considered yours.

  Who proved them wrong and demanded respect.

  Who lost everything, and found a reason to keep going.

  Who were told to believe, but still searched for the truth.

  To you, the ones who forged the path so others could follow.

  Who would not be silent. Would not be silenced.

  To you.

  The ones who were first to do what they said couldn’t be done by someone like you.

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Also by Kerrigan Byrne

  About the Author

  1

  The arrangement of Frank Sawyer’s corpse was queer enough to lend me pause. He hung upside down in the common room, suspended from the rafter by one foot, the other bent behind him, his spindly legs forming a strange triangle.

  I’d seen too many bodies to recall the exact number but, in my experience, those hanging from a rope most often did so by their throats. In this case, there didn’t seem to be enough left of a throat to manage a proper hanging.

  “You should know better than to linger at a threshold, Fiona, lest a demon take you.”

  I whirled to face the voice behind me with my hand over my startled heart, thanking all the saints I could conjure that it was not Inspector Croft who’d caught me snooping at a murder scene before a body had been removed.

  Especially after he’d told me some time ago, in no uncertain terms, to not enter a structure until the evidence of a crime had been conducted forth. And I hadn’t. Technically, the threshold was still out on the street.

  “Aidan, you startled me,” I reproached. “What are you doing here?”

  Whitechapel was a long way from Limerick, Ireland, where Aidan Fitzpatrick and I had been whelped and raised. It’d been an eternity since my elder brothers, Flynn and Finnegan, followed Aidan around like two identical twin shadows.

  And not because they’d fallen out with each other, but because neither Aidan nor I believed in ghosts. And chances were good that Finn and Flynn had conned St. Peter into letting them be angels, though they scarcely did anything in their tragically short lifetimes to deserve the designation.

  “I’m here for the same reason as you, I suspect. To clean up after death.” He looked past me into the common house, and his winsome smile died a slow death, taking with it the rogue I’d known before he donned the cassock. “I have to keep telling you, Fiona. Call me Father Fitzpatrick,” he reminded me with idle distraction.

  “Just so, Father Fitzpatrick.” I cringed at the taste the title left on my tongue—like bitter herbs and disappointed expectations. “And you can call me Miss Mahoney if we’re being proper folk.”

  One shouldn’t look at a priest the way I looked at Aidan. But surely God forgave me, because every other lady in his congregation did the same. He had the countenance and figure of a fallen angel, not to mention the voice of a seraph.

  I knew that he’d pledged his life—his heart—to God. But he’d promised it to me first upon a day and, saints preserve me, I felt downright proprietary about it sometimes. I supposed a vow of fidelity was easier to break to your best mate’s freckled and bespectacled little sister than to the Almighty.

  “I thought a man of the cloth wasn’t supposed to pay mind to superstitious pagan beliefs like thresholds and the in-between,” I chided.

  “Perhaps not, but we do believe in demons, and there are plenty to be found hereabouts.” All traces of good humor vanished, and we locked eyes for a solemn moment before his big, tentative hand settled on my shoulder.

  He knew what this place did to me. He understood the demons that awaited me here.

  I hated that he could identify my weakness. That he knew what it looked like because he’d seen it before. He’d witnessed me at my worst.

  I was no stranger to Father Aidan Fitzpatrick’s touch. There was a time that his hands thrilled me with carnal delight. They sent me to my own priest to confess when they’d found their illicit way beneath my bodice when we were young and, I’d thought, in love.

  Now, his touch was simply offered as a balm. A comfort. The only familiar warmth to be found in a cold, pitiless world.

  He scrutinized the gruesome corpse with dark eyes that had always seemed incongruous with the gold in his hair. Aidan didn’t cringe at the inky sight of Mr. Sawyer’s blood, all drained from his open throat onto the floorboards. I would give him that much. I imagined him being a soldier contributed to his stoic mien. He’d witnessed countless wounds and plenty of blood. Perhaps even sinew and bone, like that of Mr. Sawyer’s spine, visible through his open throat.

  I winced at the sight, more because I felt I ought to, rather than out of sympathy.

  I wouldn’t identify my feelings about this murder until much, much later. Not because I didn’t possess them, mind, but because something inside of me long ago decided I didn’t get to have emotions in the presence of death.

  They came for me later, when I least expected them.

  “They told me Frank Sawyer died when they summoned me here, not that he’d been murdered,” Aidan said with grave solemnity. “Where’s Agnes?”

  “Agnes, who?”

  “Agnes Sawyer.” He glanced at me as though I were daft. “Frank Sawyer’s wife.”

  “I imagine she’s being guarded by Constable Fanshaw over there.” I pointed in the direction of a dozen doorways, indicating one boasting a sentinel from the London Metropolitan Police.

  Aidan took a step toward it, instantly alert. “Is she alone?”

  I blinked. Weren’t we all alone at a time like this?

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Fiona, how could you leave her at such a time?”

  “I only just arrived.” I scowled up at him, not appreciating the censure in his voice one bit. I didn’t know Agnes Sawyer, and she wasn’t acquainted with me. What possible comfort could I offer to her now? “She has her husband’s blood on her clothes and shoes. That’s evidence, isn’t it?”

  “You could be all sorts of comfort to her, Fiona.” He leveled me with his most priestly look. “You understand exactly what she’s going through at this moment.”

  “I didn’t know she was part of your congregation.” I crossed defensive arms over my chest, unwilling to open that door right now. “Or I’d have sent for you myself.”

  “You would have known if you ever came to church. Sometimes, Fiona, I worry for yo
ur soul.” He cast me a damning look before he hurried toward the next door.

  Aye, well. Sometimes, I worried for my soul, too. God knew I’d committed enough sins to procure my place in Hell.

  Aidan went to the door next to the one in which I stood and held an urgent, sotto voce conversation with Constable Fanshaw. The lawman nodded, shook Aidan’s hand, and led the priest inside.

  I watched Aidan’s features transform just before he disappeared into the gloom, sharp angles arranging from exasperation to compassion with practiced ease.

  I drifted toward the threshold and eavesdropped, as I had naught to do until the body was conveyed to the coroner.

  Agnes Sawyer hadn’t made so much as a peep until she saw Aidan.

  After, her sobs could have roused the dead.

  They say we Irish are cannier than most, that we are born with senses others don’t possess. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t bring myself to budge once Agnes Sawyer began to cry because I heard the melody of horror in her weeping. I felt the shock and terror, the grief and pain of stumbling upon a slaughtered loved one as though it were my own.

  And it had been. More than once.

  I pictured what must have occurred as Agnes Sawyer came home to find her husband displayed in such a ghastly way, his blood slowed to a mere trickle from what little remained of his neck.

  When they say that blood is thicker than water, it’s valid in the most literal sense.

  It’s more slippery, as well.

  That’s likely why I noted the edge of the congealing puddle had been interrupted by the skid of a boot heel. Why Mr. Sawyer’s open collar and vest bore the crimson smears and stains of dainty fingers.

  Because his wife had held desperate hands to his neck. She’d clutched at her dead husband, kneeling in his gore. Anyone with the slightest powers of observation would have taken one glance at the scene and known that Mr. Sawyer was beyond hope.

  Shock and grief made loonies of us all.

  Mrs. Sawyer made my job harder by doing what she did. She spread the blood about, painting a macabre portrait of motion with the bottom of her skirts. But I didn’t blame her a bit. I never did. During such a terrible mess, no one thought about who would have to clean it up later.

  And why should they?

  It had been my experience that most people couldn’t bring themselves to bear witness to what I do. Often, if they tried, they ended up hating through their gratitude. No one else wanted to be on their knees scouring up parts of their loved ones.

  I attempted to remember sometimes, as I scrubbed the blood and offal from my hands, the exact, lamentable instant that the horrific became commonplace. Try as I might to pin the moment in effigy, like a lepidopterist would a butterfly to his board, I found it quite impossible.

  Countless corpses rolled through my recollection with photographic detail. Except, unlike a photograph, these images contained the startling third dimension, as one would see through the scopes of a stereograph.

  To say nothing of the other sensory reminiscences. The odors. The…tactile.

  I asked myself: why bother with the gruesome carcasses of the past when there is a right grisly one just in front of me? And there would be others. Death’s business was a messy one.

  And I made my living cleaning up after him. At least, here in London.

  Aidan’s tall shadow knelt behind a flimsy partition separating one side of the tiny, pathetic room from the other. A lone lamp cast his shadow against it, along with the hunched form of poor Mrs. Sawyer, perched on the edge of a sparse bed. A cold cookstove hunkered in the corner, and I could barely make out a well-worn table protecting four mismatched dining chairs. Despite my unkind estimation of the place, it was one of the more comfortable lodging houses in this particular part of Whitechapel, in that it was a dwelling for a single family rather than a cupboard for countless thieves, immigrants, workmen, and prostitutes who would pay four pence for a vermin-ridden bed.

  I listened to the hypnotic sympathy in Aidan’s voice. It seemed to calm the distraught woman. “Do you believe that your husband will meet God?” he asked gently. “That he’ll receive his just reward?”

  “I do, Father.”

  “As do I, Agnes. I believe it with all my heart and soul. Your husband’s suffering in this life has ended, and that can be its own blessing.”

  I didn’t have to be on their side of the partition to see his gentle, encouraging smile. I could hear it. I’d been the recipient of it more times than I deserved.

  “Take comfort,” he soothed. “Death is only anguish for those who believe it is truly the end.” Aidan handed her a bottle of something I suspected to be a spirit of the unholy kind.

  “You Irish are full of blarney.” Inspector Croft’s shadow slid over me like the cold specter of winter, and I had to suppress a shudder. “That man suffered plenty of anguish before he gave up the ghost.”

  If Aidan’s presence was a balm to me, then Inspector Grayson Croft was the rash. My entire being prickled with defensive awareness. I mustered the most vitriolic glare I was capable of and retreated outside to where Hao Long, my assistant, patiently stood by the cart with our supplies.

  Croft ambled after me, all loose limbs and hulking shoulders. He seemed uncomfortable in his gray suit. In any suit, really. With his slick, dark hair, and undignified jaw that always wanted shaving, he would fit in with the bruisers at the ironworker’s union meetings rather than the upright fellows at Scotland Yard.

  Perhaps that was more of a help than a hindrance to him here in Whitechapel.

  “Shame on you, for saying such things within earshot of a grieving widow,” I admonished him, plucking a scraper and pail from my cart with curt, angry movements.

  “Shame on your priest for lying to her,” Croft rumbled. “He didn’t know Mr. Sawyer’s secret sins. The ones he never dared to confess.”

  “Do you?”

  “Nay, but a murder like this has a way of revealing them.” He glanced to the door beyond which Frank Sawyer’s corpse still swung in the darkness. “My point is, your priest can’t promise the widow that her husband’s gone to Heaven.”

  “He’s not my priest,” I snapped.

  Listening to him was like traversing the gravel pits with only moonlight to guide me. Inspector Croft wasn’t from London. Anyone could tell by the lilt of his accent that he had been born somewhere south of Scotland but north of Hadrian’s Wall.

  Armed with my scraper and pail, I stepped eye to eye with him. Which was to say, I stepped eye to throat, as he was somewhat tall, and I was on the short side of average. “Furthermore, you’re supposed to give condolences and the like to grieving people, it’s just what’s done.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Not generally,” I admitted. “But that’s not my job, is it?”

  “Nor is it mine.” Our glares clashed and held with mutual repugnance, and he lit a fragrant cigarette, which drove me to step around him. “My job is to collect evidence and apprehend murderers.”

  “Well then, Inspector Croft, why haven’t you finished your job so I can do mine?” I asked. “If you’ve summoned me here, you’re no doubt aware that I’m unable to clean up after the cadaver until it’s gone, and I’d rather be away from Whitechapel sooner than later, all told.”

  His gaze flicked down the lane toward an address we’d both like to forget. When eyes the color of the moss clinging to the cliffs of Moher met mine, an uncharacteristic humanity lurked in the verdant depths.

  I’d come to be intrinsically wary of Inspector Croft as he gave the impression of a man with violent secrets buried beneath a rough but respectable façade. “Miss Mahoney, you must know that neither Aberline nor I would call you back to Dorset Street.”

  “Why not?” I challenged. “I answered the call, didn’t I? Same as you.” I’d returned to Dorset Street despite the fingers of ice gripping my spine.

  Beneath their chill, a whisper of providence drew me toward the past.

  I only drea
mt in nightmares because of Dorset Street. If I were honest, I’d come because I wanted to prove that I was as stout-hearted and stalwart as the others who bore witness to the most infamous butchery in Whitechapel. Those few men who’d gained their life’s notoriety from the death of my dearest childhood friend, Mary Kelly.

  Without even solving her murder.

  Some could argue—would argue—that I’d purchased my life from her death, as well…

  Which is why I still searched for her murderer after everyone had given up.

  My two-year quest for justice was not what had summoned me to the scene of my nightmares on that night. Indeed, it had been one of the bone-thin errand boys who flitted through the streets of London, delivering beatings, packages, threats, or summons in a network far wider and more economical than the newly implemented telephone lines. He’d eyes as hard as marble beneath his grimy cap as he relayed his midnight message. A death on Dorset Street needed seeing to immediately.

  My presence had been requested.

  He disappeared into the vapor of the Thames before I’d a chance to inquire as to who’d sent him to my door.

  I figured I’d witnessed enough death and blood to inoculate myself against the malevolent memory of Mary Kelly’s corpse.

  Once I’d arrived, something about the way the night shifted, the darkness claiming the many nooks and alleys of Whitechapel, the most wretched borough of London, sent a thousand insects skittering across my skin.

  Beleaguered gas lamps were few and far between, allowing the darkness to drift between their pallid spheres. A presence more insidious than the ghosts of the past regarded me from the shadows of the archway leading to the room that painted my nightmares with blood.