Sweet Things Dying - Chapters XII

In which Cole turns to the newspapers for clues... but what can be trusted?

XII

It was Sunday morning and the uncaring heart of London drummed on, black blood pulsing through its veins. From his flat, Cole stared down at the swirling tide of the Brick Lane market. A cloud of grey smoke danced upward like a hypnotic asp from the pipe clenched in his teeth. Crumpled morning papers were scattered about his feet and well-read broadsheets covered his bed. Their headlines screamed of death.

Stewart had been the progenitor of the news. Most of the morning journals purloined his article, which had splashed the front page of the Saturday evening Pall Mall Gazette: SHOCKING DISCOVERY IN EAST END, “Reverend’s Daughter Pulled from Thames – Murder Suspected.” Every newsboy in London must now be shouting those very words, or something similar, attracting every morbid ear within range. They would be selling papers faster than the printing presses could thresh them out.

Cole had gone out at first light, collecting every edition he could. He’d sat and smoked and read and re-read every respected West End paper down to every cheap-print East End paper. He’d wanted every new detail he could find about the mystery of Heather Bloom. Now he looked away from the grit-white pages, out his window to the grit-white day and at the sunlight that struggled to filter through a sky choked with the coal smoke from thousands of chimneys.

His room was comfortable for the first time in days, old Weiss having stocked his scuttle. A fire blazed in the hearth and a kettle whistled over it. But he kept his eyes on the hive of life in the street below, his thoughts lost in the blood-stained words of the news articles. All had told of the waterman who, early Saturday, found a fully-clothed young woman afloat in the Thames and how, by use of his boathook, he’d dragged it ashore and alerted the police. The examination of the Divisional Police Surgeon was quoted in most every article:

“His preliminary examinations found that the woman had been bound with hemp-rope, in a sailor’s knot, and it is the surgeon’s belief she had been in the water some days prior to recovery.”

Cole had lifted his eyes as he read – a sailor’s knot. A keen detail. He’d continued to read: