The Hyde Park Headsman - Anne Griffin Perry [86]
At dawn the following morning, Billy Sowerbutts was driving his cart slowly along Knightsbridge towards Hyde Park Corner when he was forced to come to a stop because the traffic ahead of him was packed solid. He was put out; in fact come to think of it, he was definitely angry. What was the point in getting up early, when you ached to stay in bed and sink back into sleep, if you were going to spend half the bleeding morning sitting as still as Nelson’s monument because some idiot ahead has stopped and is holding everything up?
For a hundred yards people were beginning to shout and curse. Someone’s horse shied and backed, and two carts collided, locking wheels.
That was really the last straw. Billy Sowerbutts tied the reins of his animal to the rail and jumped down. He strode past everyone else right up to the offending vehicle, a gig, which extraordinarily had no animal between the shafts, as if someone had pushed it there by hand and then abandoned it, leaving it lying askew, its rear end sufficiently far into the line of traffic to have blocked the way.
“Idjut!” he said harshly. “What kind of a fool leaves a gig in a place like this. ’ere! What the ’ell’s the matter wif yer? This in’t no place ter take a kip!” He strode around to the recumbent figure lolling in the back amid piles of old clothes. “Wake up, yer bleedin’ idjut! Get out of ’ere! Yer ’oldin up the ’ole street!” He leaned forward and shook the man’s shoulder, and felt his hand wet. He pulled it back, and in the broadening light saw his fingers dark with something. Then he leaned forward again and peered more closely at the man. He had no head.
“Jesus, Joseph and Mary!” he said, and fell over the shaft.
6
PITT SAT at his desk staring at Tellman. He felt numb, as if he had been struck a physical blow and the flesh were still too newly bruised to hurt.
“Knightsbridge, just outside the park,” Tellman repeated. “Headless, of course.” His long face showed no inner triumph or superiority this morning. “He’s still out there, Mr. Pitt; and we aren’t any closer to the swine than we were in the beginning.”
“Who was he?” Pitt asked slowly. “Anything else we know?”
“That’s just it.” Tellman screwed up his face. “He was a bus conductor.”
Pitt was startled. “A bus conductor! Not a gentleman?”
“Definitely not. Just a very ordinary, very respectable little bus conductor,” Tellman repeated. “On his way home from his last run—at least, not on his way home: that’s the odd thing.” He stared at Pitt. “He lives near the end of the line, which is out Shepherd’s Bush way. That’s what the omnibus company said.”
“So what was he doing in Knightsbridge near the park?” Pitt asked the obvious question. “Is that where he was killed?”
Memory of past conversations flashed across Tellman’s face, of Pitt’s insistence, and then his own failure to find where Arledge had been killed.
“No—at least it doesn’t look like it,” he replied. “There’s no way you can chop a man’s head off without leaving rivers of blood around, and there’s very little in the gig he was in.”
“Gig? What gig?” Pitt demanded.
“Ordinary sort of gig, except no horse,” Tellman replied.
“What do you mean a gig with no horse?” Pitt’s voice was rising in spite of himself. “Either it’s a vehicle to ride in or it’s a cart to push!”
“I mean the horse wasn’t there,” Tellman said irritably. “Nobody’s found it yet.”
“The Headsman let it loose?”
“Apparently.”
“What else?” Pitt leaned back, although no position was going to be comfortable today. “You have the head, I presume, since you know who he was and where he lived. Was he struck first? I don’t suppose he had anything worth robbing him of?”
“Yes, he was hit first, pretty hard, then his head taken off cleanly. Much better job than Arledge, poor devil. He was coming home from work, still had his uniform on, and he had three and sixpence in his pockets, which was about right, and a watch worth about five pounds. But why would anyone pick a bus conductor to rob?”
“Nobody would,” Pitt