Resurrection Row Read Free Page A

pushed his spectacles more firmly on his nose and pulled back the sheet to expose the face. The cabby’s clothes were gone and they had combed the sparse hair neatly, but it was still a repellent sight. The skin was blotched and in places beginning to come away, and the smell was cloying sick.
    Lady Fitzroy-Hammond barely looked at it before covering her face with her hands and stepping back, knocking the chair. Pitt righted it in a single movement, and the maid guided her into it. No one spoke.
    The young man pulled the sheet up again and trotted down the room to fetch a glass of water. He did it as imperturbably as if it were his daily habit—as indeed it probably was. He returned and gave it to the maid, who held it for her mistress.
    She took a gulp, then clutched onto it, her fingers white at the knuckles.
    “Yes,” she said under her breath. “That is my husband.”
    “Thank you, ma’am,” Pitt replied soberly. It was not the end of the case, but it was very probably all he would ever know. Grave robbing was of course a crime, but he did not hold any real hope that he would discover who had made this obscene gesture or why.
    “Do you feel well enough to leave now?” he asked. “I’m sure you would be more comfortable at home.”
    “Yes, thank you.” She stood up, wavered for a moment, then, followed closely by the maid, walked rather unsteadily towards the outer door.
    “That all?” the young man inquired, his voice a little lowered but still healthily cheerful. “Can I mark him as identified and release him for burial now?”
    “Yes, you may. Lord Augustus Fitzroy-Hammond. No doubt the family will tell you what arrangements they wish,” Pitt answered. “Nothing odd about the body, I suppose?”
    “Nothing at all,” the young man responded ebulliently, now that the women were beyond the door and out of earshot. “Except that he died at least three weeks ago and has already been buried once. But I suppose you knew that.” He shook his head and was obliged to resettle his glasses. “Can’t understand why anybody should do that—dig up a dead body, I mean. Not as if they’d dissected him or anything, like medical students used to—or black magicists. Quite untouched!”
    “No mark on him?” Pitt did not know why he asked; he had not expected any. It was a pure case of desecration, nothing more. Some lunatic with a bizarre twist to his mind.
    “None at all,” the young man agreed. “Elderly gentleman, well cared for, well nourished, a little corpulent, but not unusual at his age. Soft hands, very clean. Never seen a dead lord before, so far as I know, but that’s exactly what I would have expected one to look like.”
    “Thank you,” Pitt said slowly. “In that case there is little more for me to do.”
    Pitt attended the reinterment as a matter of course. It was just possible that whoever had committed the outrage might be there to see the result of his act on the family. Perhaps that was the motive, some festering hatred still not worked through, even with death.
    It was naturally a quiet affair; one does not make much of burying a person a second time. However, there was a considerable group of people who had come to pay their respects, perhaps more out of sympathy for the widow than further regard for the dead. They were all dressed in black and had black ribbons on their carriages. They processed in silence to the grave and stood, heads bowed in the rain. Only one man had the temerity to turn up his collar in concession to comfort. Everyone else ignored the movement in pretense that it had not happened. What was the small displeasure of icy trickles down the neck when one was faced with the monumental solemnity of death?
    The man with the collar was slender, an inch or two above average height, and his delicate mouth was edged with deep lines of humor. It was a wry face, with crooked brown eyebrows; certainly there was nothing jovial in it.
    The local policeman was standing beside