LITMIR.BIZ

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and purposes, foreign ground. There might as well have been a sign at the entrance to the street proclaiming Abandon hope, all ye who enter here; despite the authority his Runner’s warrant gave him, Hawkwood knew it held as much sway here as on the far side of the moon. But while he was here, he remained under Jago’s protection. Had that not been the case, his safety would not have been assured.

      Unless Micah came to his aid.

      Hawkwood didn’t know a lot about Jago’s lieutenant, other than the former sergeant trusted him with his life. He’d been a soldier, Jago had once let that slip, but as to where and when he’d served, Jago didn’t know, or else he knew but had decided that was Micah’s own business and therefore exempt from discussion, unless Micah chose to make it so.

      He was younger than Hawkwood, probably by a decade, and, from what Hawkwood did know of him, a man of few words. There had been two occasions when, in company with Jago, Micah had stood at Hawkwood’s shoulder and both times he’d shown himself to be resourceful, calm in a crisis, and good with weapons; characteristics which had been even more evident this evening. What more was required from a right-hand man?

      Jago’s voice broke into Hawkwood’s thoughts.

      “All right, so what’s this all about?”

      A shadow appeared at the table and Jago paused. It was Jasper, bearing the drinks, which coincided with Ned and Del’s return from their downstairs delivery.

      “Good lad,” Del said, reaching for a glass. “All that totin’, I’m bloody parched.”

      They might have been a couple of draymen dropping off casks of ale, Hawkwood mused, rather than drinking pals who’d just deposited three dead bodies on to a cart loaded with barrels of human waste.

      Glancing around, it occurred to him that anyone walking into the room afresh wouldn’t have the slightest notion that anything untoward had taken place, save, perhaps, for noticing a few more dark stains on the floor that hadn’t been there before. Though, even as he pondered on the matter, these were being wiped away with wet rags and a fresh layer of sawdust applied.

      It was uncanny, Hawkwood thought, how men and women, when surrounded by the most appalling squalor, swiftly become immune to the worst excesses of human nature. Here, where only the strongest survived, in a welter of gunfire, three men had died in as many seconds and yet, even before their bodies had been removed, the world, such as it was, had returned to normal, or as normal as it could be in a place like this.

      He wondered what that said about his own actions. He was a peace officer, supposedly on the side of justice, and yet in the blink of an eye he’d knifed one man to death and shot the head off another. But then the Shaughnessys and their cohort had been prepared to murder in cold blood. Hawkwood had been a witness to that and he had acted without any thought as to the consequences. So had killing now become second nature? Was life really that cheap?

      Micah reappeared.

      “It’s done,” he said quietly.

      Jago nodded. “That case, me an’ ’is lordship here need a bit of privacy, which means we’re commandeerin’ the table. Del, you, Ned and Jasper take a look around. See if any more Shaughnessys are loiterin’ with intent. Don’t want to be caught with our pants down again, do we?”

      A pointed look towards Jasper prompted a quick emptying of glasses while three pairs of eyes swivelled in Hawkwood’s direction. Del, somewhat inevitably, was the first to speak, though his face was unexpectedly serious.

      “Any friend of Nathaniel’s is a friend of ours. What you did tonight … you’ll always be welcome here …” And then the irrepressible grin returned. “… Officer.”

      Jago shook his head. “God save us. All right, bugger off. I’ll see you at the Ark.”

      The three men turned away.

      “Oi!”

      They looked back.

      “You can take those with you. Don’t want ’em givin’ the place a bad name.” Jago indicated the Barbars, but then turned to Hawkwood. “Unless you want a souvenir?”

      The offer was tempting. They were fine weapons; man stoppers.

      “They’re all yours,” Hawkwood said.

      The guns were collected and the trio headed towards the exit. Jago addressed Micah: “No more excitement tonight, all right?”

      Micah nodded.

      Jago winked. “Best reload, though, just in case.”

      Micah’s mouth twitched. He looked off as Del, Jasper and Ned left by the back stairs and then his eyes returned to Jago and he nodded once more. Returning to his table, he took his seat, moved his discarded book to one side, and began to clean the pistol.

      Jago turned to Hawkwood. “He scares me sometimes, too.”

      Hawkwood took a sip of brandy, savouring the taste. He suspected it was from Jago’s private stock that the landlord kept under the counter, which meant it was French, not Spanish. He wondered if Jago’s trip to the coast had anything to do with his supply routes. Best not to enquire too deeply into that.

      “Right,” Jago said. “Where were we?”

      Hawkwood placed his glass on the table. “There’s been a murder.”

      “In this town? There’s a novelty.”

      “Any other night and I’d think it was funny, too.”

      “But it ain’t?”

      “Not by a long shot.”

      “Which’d also be funny by itself, right?”

      “Not this time,” Hawkwood said. “This one’s different.”

       3

      It occurred to Hawkwood, as he stared down at the body, that the last grave he’d looked into had been his own.

      That had been in a forest clearing on the far side of the world. There had been snow on the ground and frost on the trees and the chilled night air had been made rank by the sour smell of a latrine ditch because that was what lye smelled like when used to render down bodies. The bodies in question should have been his and that of Major Douglas Lawrence, courtesy of an American execution detail. In the end, it had been Hawkwood and Lawrence who’d stumbled away, leaving four dead Yankee troopers in their wake and an American army in hot pursuit. It was strange how things worked out and how a vivid memory could be triggered by the sight of a corpse in a pit.

      This particular pit occupied the south-west corner of St George the Martyr’s burying ground. Situated in the parish of St Pancras, the burying ground was unusual in that it was nowhere near the church to which it was dedicated. That lay a third of a mile away to the south, on the other side of Queen Square; not a huge distance but markedly inconvenient when it came to conducting funeral and burial services.

      Also unique was the fact that, along its northern aspect, the graveyard shared a dividing wall with a neighbouring cemetery, that of St George’s Church, Bloomsbury, which made Hawkwood wonder, in a moment of inappropriate whimsy, if any funeral processions had inadvertently found themselves on the wrong side of the wall. There were no convenient gates linking the two burial grounds, meaning that any funeral party which turned left instead of right would have to reverse all the way back to the entrances on Grays Inn Lane and start all over again.

      The burying ground’s southern perimeter was also determined by a wall, though of a greater height than the dividing one for it had been built to separate the cemetery from the grounds of the Foundling Hospital, a vast, grey building which dwarfed its surroundings like a man-o’-war towering above a fleet of rowboats. The rear of the chapel roof was just visible above the ivy-covered parapet, as were the chimneys and upper storeys of the

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