Free Legion of the Dead by Paul Stewart

witnessed in Adelaide Graveyard in my feverish state? Was it a mere figment of my imagination, or not? I certainly hoped it was. The alternative, that Firejaw O’Rourke had indeed come back to life, was too gruesome to consider. Today was Tuesday. Even if the body had been bound for the dissection table, they couldn’t have finished with it already.
    ‘Come on, Will,’ I said, climbing to my feet. ‘I’m not going to be happy until I’ve found out one way or the other.’
    ‘The hospital?’ he said.
    ‘The hospital.’
    With my arm still bundled up in its sling, highstacking was out of the question. Instead, Will and I made our way across town down with all the other cobblestone-creepers. It was late afternoon by now, and the streets were thronging.
    We dog-legged through the Laynes – ancientcobbled alleys lined with tiny workshops that, each day, burst out of their cramped premises onto the street to display their wares. An elbowing crowd jostled one another as bargain-hunters picked their way through stacks and racks of produce, noisily haggling.
    I squeezed past a portly dowager, her nose the colour of port-wine and her fleshy arms buried deep in a pile of tawdry lace antimacassars, who was stridently arguing over their price. A rickets-bowed gardener was inspecting a row of spades outside Guthrie’s Ironmongery next door. Further on, two grubby children were teasing a small bony dog with the toffee-apple they were sharing, making it leap up, before hiding the sweetmeat behind their backs – and leaving the dog yapping with frustration …
    As we reached the corner of Marchant Lane and Croup End, the rank odour of the Tivoli Slaughterhouse curdled with the sharp eye-watering tang from Selsey’s vinegar factory,filling the air with an unspeakable odour. Covering our noses, we entered Margolies Street, where a mist of pink and white dust filled the air. Sills, steps, kerbs, ledges; every surface in the narrow street was covered in a fine layer of powder.
    Four shops along, the curved sign above a pair of wrought-iron gates announced in gothic lettering,
Algernon Mortimer & Company - Monumental Masons
. I peered inside as we passed.
    Two stocky men in overalls stood at the centre of a yard, their bodies swathed in the billowing dust as they sawed at a large slab of veined stone. A third man – a red-and-black spotted kerchief tied round his head – was seated on a low stool to their right, chisel and mallet in hand, chipping away at an arch-shaped gravestone. He was whistling something bright and tuneful which rose up above the grinding noise of the stone-cutting, the perky melody at odds withthe sombre nature of his job.
    Stacked about him in rows were finished headstones, each one awaiting their inscriptions. Black, white, pink and grey; some were extravagant, some modest. There were arched slabs and corniced oblongs. One was carved like a scroll, another like a book, its pages fixed for ever half-open, while several were simple yet elegant crosses made of granite or sandstone.
    But it wasn’t the gravestones that made me stop and stare, open-mouthed, through the gates of the monumental mason’s. No, it was the sight of the carved figures perched above them – stone angels, wings spread wide, hands clasped and heads bowed, their sightless eyes staring down. I shivered uncontrollably as, for a fleeting moment, I was transported back to the horror of Adelaide Graveyard.
    I felt a tug on my arm. ‘You all right, Barnaby?’ Will asked. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a—’
    ‘Don’t say it,’ I interrupted him. ‘Come on, St Jude’s is just up ahead.’
    We rounded the corner of Bishops Walk and there it was, the tall imposing neoclassical frontage of St Jude’s Hospital.
    Thirty years earlier, the place had been a scandal – little more than a fever pit from which patients were lucky to get out alive. Its doctors had been the worst kind of sawbones; its nurses gin-soaked drabs. But that had all