It was only a short distance back to the jail on Kirkgate, not far enough to let his thoughts wander. The bodies would already be there, waiting on thick stone slabs in the back room they kept as a mortuary, and he needed to look more closely at them.
It wasn’t a prospect he ever relished. Murder in all its forms was common enough, and he saw the results. The souls might have gone to a better place, but too often it was obvious that the bodies had done all they could to cling to life. Nottingham found no pleasure in examining the wounds or the effect of poisons, and cataloguing the pain on the faces.
This would be harder than most. Usually the bodies were anonymous, just names on a sheet of paper or faces he’d seen before. This time he had to look at Pamela, to go past the memories and see beyond the girl he’d watched grow into a woman and find anything that might help him discover the person who’d killed her.
Nottingham felt the chill of the room as he entered, his candle throwing large shadows on the walls as he set it down on the table. He decided to concentrate on Morton’s body first, trying to keep his mind off Pamela, and yanked the sheet off the corpse. The dead man’s face had strong features, and his hair had recently been shaved to stubble under a costly wig. When the Constable turned the wrists, he saw Morton’s hands were those of a gentleman, soft and clean and unused to labour. Slowly, Nottingham unbuttoned the corpse’s long waistcoat and shirt, noting the two cuts on the chest, teasing the material away from the dried blood, working gently and patiently until he revealed skin.
He judged the blade must have been an inch across and finely sharpened. As far as he could tell, it must have been long, too, driven deep into the body between the ribs. He spent several silent minutes poring over the wounds and imagining the angle of the blows. Not a professional killing, he concluded; that would have only needed a single cut. Yet at the same time, it didn’t look like the crazed work of a madman. That wasn’t much help, but it was better than nothing at all.
The Constable turned his attention to Morton’s pockets. There was a notebook in his coat, almost new, with a few lines for sermons scribbled in it, and the letter from Rawlinson, written the month before, folded and refolded several times, inviting him to Leeds to preach. A handkerchief, well used, as if Morton had been suffering from a cold. The waistcoat only held a few small coins and a gold watch, still ticking, inscribed To Daniel, from your loving father on the back. So robbery hadn’t been a motive.
He had to steel himself to move across to Pamela and pull down the shroud that covered her. In death she looked younger, more brittle. One of the men must have found an old, faded shawl in the court and folded it across her belly; the scrap of blue ribbon had been laid on top of it. He remembered Mary giving her that shawl years before, one spring night when she looked chilled. She’d kept it all this time, or maybe she’d never been able to afford a new one. Her dress had been mended so many times that in places it seemed more yarn than material.
She’d been stabbed twice, too. Like Morton, the blows had been to her chest. Even without pulling down the bodice of her dress, Nottingham could judge that the same knife had killed them both. One of them must have cried out, he thought, idly stroking his chin. Someone must have heard something.
Cuts and bruises covered her arms, some fading, others more recent. What interested him was a livid mark on her face, by the cheekbone. It hadn’t had time to bloom, but the blow had obviously been vicious. He could almost feel it and see her head snapping backwards. It would have been enough to leave her stunned, gasping and vulnerable.
Pamela’s small hands were bunched into fists, and he pried them open carefully. Her fingers were rough and red, the nails cracked and bitten, the palms heavily calloused. No one would have mistaken her for a lady.
Her hands were empty, and he understood the fists were her last small act of defiance against her murderer. There was no sign of the token he had given her. Had she lost it in the struggle, or had the murderer taken it? If so, why? He leaned back against the wall, gazing at the two bodies. Someone had put them together, thrown them away among the rubbish. But the way they’d been placed, in a harsh, deliberate parody of coupling, meant that whoever did it had wanted people to believe them together.
Perhaps they had been, Nottingham wondered. Morton would hardly the first preacher to succumb to sins of the flesh. In his time he’d known several whose words and deeds hardly matched, and Pamela couldn’t have afforded to be choosy about her men. Rawlinson had insisted his guest was a devout Christian man, but keeping secrets was easy. An evening stroll could quickly turn into a hunt for a woman.
Yet why kill them? What had they done, what had they seen?
Nottingham sighed and ran a hand through his hair.
Maybe someone had wanted Morton dead, and Pamela had been killed because she was in the wrong place. Or, he thought, turning the idea upside down, Pamela had been the victim, and Morton had been the innocent.
But it was too early for theories. He needed evidence.