Free The Broken Token by Chris Nickson Page B

undertaker to prepare Pamela’s corpse and carry it to the church.
    More than twenty four hours had gone by since the murder and he was no further along than when he’d first seen the bodies. By his calculations he had another day before the Mayor would
demand results. He needed some bloody answers.

11
    It took two full hours before a boy ran breathlessly into the jail to give him Pamela’s address, longer than he’d expected in a city of seven thousand people. He
threw the lad a farthing before striding out up Kirkgate and crossing Briggate in the shadow of the Moot Hall.
    The place was a step up from Queen Charlotte’s Court, but only a small one. Unpaved, it stank of night soil the residents had thrown out. Long ago, Nottingham mused, this would have been
part of the garden of a grand house. Now the only thing it grew was people, bunched together like weeds in a neglected, overgrown lot. He’d spent half his childhood living in places like
this.
    If anyone had ever cared for these buildings, that time had been far in the past. A couple seemed to be collapsing in on themselves, propped up by scavenged pieces of wood. The others seemed
little better, held together by a mixture of faith and despair.
    The boy had told him the front door of the house he wanted was white, but that was a generous term. What remained was a grimy, tired grey, and the wood was so warped that opening it became a
battle.
    Downstairs in the cellar, he’d been told, the third door, and he went, the smell of unwashed bodies, illness and hopelessness around him. He knew places like this all too well. You could
leave them but they never left you, sticking inside the body and the mind forever, like an itching burr, and squeezing out hope. Nothing good could ever happen in this kind of place.
    He tried the handle of the third door, surprised when it opened; most residents of places like this had precious little but locked up what they had. Anything Pamela had owned would be the
property of others by now.
    He came face to face with a burly man nearly as tall as himself. His blue eyes were filled with wildness, and a bushy, uncombed beard cascaded on to his chest.
    “Who are you, eh?” It wasn’t so much a question as an accusation, the words delivered in a long slur as his alcohol breath filled the room. A nearly-empty jug of gin sat on the
floor next to a straw-filled pallet, the room’s only furniture. Nails had been hammered into the walls, and an old coat, worn through at the elbows, hung on one.
    The man came closer.
    “I said, who the fuck are you?”
    Nottingham raised his palms in conciliation and smiled cautiously.
    “I think I have the wrong room.”
    In the face of an apology the man seemed to deflate.
    “Unless the bastard’s let it to you, too.”
    “How long have you been here?” the Constable asked, suddenly suspicious.
    “Since last night.” He gestured expansively, legs wobbling. “All mine, until next week when I can’t pay his rent.”
    “And where’s the man who runs the house?”
    “Upstairs.” The man paused, scrambling down to his knees to drink greedily from the gin as if it were nectar. “Top two floors.” He paused again. “The king’s
palace,” he added enigmatically.
    Nottingham backed out of the room and climbed the stairs quickly, past the fractious squall of hungry babies and silences as deep as death. Where they ended the solid door looked no cleaner or
brighter than the rest of the place. He knocked loudly, hearing shuffling steps on the other side. A moment later the haunted eyes of a very young maid looked at him.
    Her dress had been exquisite once, the stitching small, even and fine, but over the years all the colour had been washed from it. Far too big, it hung loosely on her tiny body, trailing
dangerously on the ground and covering thin, childlike wrists. The neckline was high, but not high enough to cover the fading bruises.
    “I’d like to see your master,” he said.
    She