with dissipating powder smoke and the sulphurous stench of rotten eggs, while the scene was more reminiscent of an abattoir than a public house. Around the room, people were slowly regaining their feet, transfixed by the carnage. Astonishingly, from below there came the screech of a fiddle starting up, indicating that, to the downstairs clientele, who’d only heard the gunshots and not witnessed the effects, it had sounded like just another drunken night in the Hanged Man.
Jago stood groggily, ears ringing. He stared down at the bodies and then at the two men who’d come to a halt beside him.
One was the former occupant of the far table who now held a discharged pistol. The second man, whose hands gripped the still-smoking Barbar, was taller and might have been mistaken for an associate of the dead men, for he, too, was dressed in a long military greatcoat. The difference was that he wore no hat, which, now that he had drawn closer, rendered his features visible, in particular the powder burn below his right eye and the two ragged scars that ran across his left cheek.
Jago stared at him. The other man gazed back, a grim smile on his face.
“Can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?” he said.
Several seconds passed before Jago found his voice.
“Nice to see you, too, Officer Hawkwood. It’s been a while.”
“So who were they?”
Hawkwood looked down at the body being hauled unceremoniously towards the back stairs by the boot heels, Del and Ned having taken a leg each. A trail of blood, black in the candlelight, marked their passage across the uneven floorboards.
Jago followed his gaze. “That one’s Patrick Shaughnessy. The one missin’ half ’is brains – good shot, by the way; those things have quite a kick – is his younger brother, Declan, who didn’t have that much reasonin’ power to begin with. The one who had the drop on Micah, I don’t know; never seen him before. Ne’er-do-well cousin, I expect. They tend to hunt in packs. Christ, go easy, Padre!”
The former physician’s name was Roper. His manner and the way in which Jago had summoned him to tend to his wounds indicated to Hawkwood that this probably wasn’t the first time his services had been called upon. There had been a faint tremor in the man’s hands as he’d helped Jago remove his bloodied shirt, which either suggested he was fearful of his patient or else he had an over-fondness for the Genever, which might have gone some way to explain why he was reduced to performing crudely lit examinations on the floor of the Hanged Man rather than by chandelier in a set of well-appointed consulting rooms in Berkley Square.
Jago winced as a pea-sized nub of black gravel was prised from the meat of his shoulder and deposited with a plunk on to a tin plate by his elbow. The physician was extracting the projectiles using a pair of tweezers he’d taken from a black bag that had been resting beneath the table he’d recently vacated. Some pieces of shrapnel had gone in deeper than others and among the paraphernalia set down were several rolls of lint bandage, two scalpels, scissors and a collection of vials with indecipherable labels which could have contained anything from laudanum to cold elderberry tea. If Hawkwood hadn’t known any better, it looked as though the former doctor had come prepared for surgery.
The room was gradually coming to order. Chairs and tables had been righted and free drinks dispensed. Conversations had resumed, albeit warily and with startled glances whenever somebody coughed or scraped a chair leg inadvertently. It was plain that around some tables nerves were still a tad jittery.
Despite the air of jumpiness, Hawkwood couldn’t help but consider the way in which most of those present seemed to have recovered from the shock of having had their evening’s drinking so startlingly interrupted. He knew the ways of the capital’s rookeries, of which there were several – nurseries of crime, as the authorities had christened them – and had meted out his own form of justice in their diseased enclaves often enough. Even so, the speed with which equilibrium had been restored in this particular hostelry spoke volumes for the manner in which the inhabitants of the rookeries went about their daily lives: their casual attitude towards death and summary justice, and their complete lack of faith in anything approaching legitimate authority; not one person had suggested calling the police. In this place, any support there might once have been for the forces of law and order had evaporated a long time ago.
Hawkwood studied the body of the second Shaughnessy brother, which wasn’t yet on the move. The shot from the Barbar – also loaded with gravel, he guessed – had torn into the dead man’s upper torso as effectively as grape cutting through a square of infantry. Death would have been close to instantaneous. If the brothers had just woken up together, either in Hell or Purgatory, they’d be wondering what had hit them.
“They seemed a tad annoyed,” Hawkwood said.
Jago grunted as another piece of gravel was levered out. “They were annoyed? State of my shirt; I’m bloody livid. Ruined my game, too; ’specially as I was up.”
“What were they mad about?”
“Idiots had ideas above their station. Thought they could work their way around the natural peckin’ order. I had to set them straight. They didn’t like being chastised. Patrick in particular.”
“Newcomers, I take it?”
St Giles was often the first port of call for the poorest of the Irish immigrants who came looking for a new start in a new city. Those inhabitants who’d failed to welcome the influx with open arms referred to it as Little Dublin.
Jago nodded. “They were warned. They didn’t listen.”
“There could be more of them.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. The buggers breed like rats. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“Be interesting to know how they came by the guns,” Hawkwood said, eyeing the three blunderbusses that were taking up space at the other end of the table. “These look like Post Office issue.”
“You askin’ as a police officer or a concerned citizen?”
“Both.”
The blunderbuss was the weapon of choice for mail coach guards, who were the only Post Office employees allowed to carry firearms. Designed to protect the cargo from interception by highwaymen, they had served their purpose well. There hadn’t been a serious attack on a mail coach for more than two decades.
“Money talks,” Jago said. “How many villains you know have been caught carryin’ an army- or navy-issue pistol? Bloody ’undreds, I should think. Scatterguns ain’t that hard to get hold of, you know the right person.”
“And you’d know that how?” Hawkwood said.
Jago grinned and tapped his nose with his left forefinger and then said, “Shit!” as another bit of gravel was extracted and dropped on to the plate.
Hawkwood counted them up. Five tiny olive-pit-sized fragments occupied the platter, while a couple of puncture wounds had yet to be probed.
Still, he thought, Jago had been lucky.
“You were lucky,” Hawkwood said.
Jago
