The Dolocher Read online

  Chapter 5

  Thomas Olocher’s body was found the following morning on Lesser Elbow Lane in a condition that had even the soldiers who found it—men who had seen the most brutal war had to offer in both India and the West Indies—gagging. The white sheet he had been wrapped in lay torn, muddy, and bloody a few feet from the body. They had to shoo away some pigs that had been feasting on the corpse, and it was this that made the men nauseated. Olocher’s cheeks were gone, and the wound at his throat, where he had slashed to kill himself, had been gnawed at and opened further. The clothes he’d worn were rags on him, as the feral pigs’ teeth had torn through to get to the flesh underneath.

  The filth from the roads and sewers and the pigs’ bodies was all mashed up with torn skin, blood, and pig saliva. His intestines had been pulled from his body, and this is what the last pig was working on when they got there. A small dog with a wet, red snout sat to the side, awaiting his turn, having been forced out by the much larger and more aggressive animals. What part of Olocher’s skin not red or mud coloured was blue-white and looked as though it would be hard to the touch. It was not possible to tell if those who’d taken the body had done any injury to it.

  At the infirmary, Alderman James looked over the wreckage of the body. The surgeon had left him alone, stomping away saying that they should have left the body in the lane for the animals to finish off. James had been at the trial of this man and, in fact, had been involved in bringing the case to the magistrate. To look at what was left of Olocher now, James could hardly recognise it as the same being. None of Olocher’s own victims had ever looked as bad as this when he had finished with them.

  He left orders for the body to be disposed of in a proper, albeit quiet, way, and he went back to his home on Henrietta Street. The carriage rattled over the uneven road surface, and James tried to focus on some papers he had pertaining to other crimes that had been reported. Thomas Olocher might have been the most notorious Dublin criminal this season, but he was by no means the only one; he was not even the only murderer on the prowl. There was the case James was looking at now: three murders on the north side of Dublin, all around Haymarket. This seemed an open-and-shut case; the guilty party was known to him and would be easy to find if he tried to run. The new worry was the public’s reaction. Before, people were tried and sentenced, and that was an end to it. But now, with all the leaflets that were distributed about each crime and the rumours and stories (mostly, it had to be said, from the upper classes) that spread like wildfire through the taverns and markets, the public had plenty to say about the justice system and were not afraid to express it. This man, the other murderer he thought of now, would have to be tried quickly and hanged just as quickly, along with proper arrangements made for where he was to go before execution and a decent search of his person made this time. Riots were the last thing the alderman wanted in this ever-growing city.

  When he got home, dinner was about to be served, and his guests had arrived before him. He made his apologies and joined them after a quick change of clothes.

  Throughout the meal, he found that he couldn't stop seeing the body of Thomas Olocher; it was as though it were imprinted in his mind. He’d seen countless dead in his many years, and in states of extreme violence at that, but none of them had ever had the effect of what he had seen today.

  The meat on his table was dripping with grease and gravy, and as he looked at the food, he couldn’t help but see the remnants of Olocher’s limbs and innards. Potatoes mashed up looked like the mulch that hid behind the open skull face he’d looked into.

  The events of the past twenty-four hours were, of course, well known by now, and they were the talk of the table. It never ceased to amaze James how interested people were in gory details and criminal goings-on, when if ever faced with the reality, they would either faint or throw up. He answered their questions with disinterest, as though it were all in a day’s work and the case were no different from those he generally worked on. He changed the subject to other crimes frequently, only to see it ramble back to the point it had started from.

  As he saw his guests out that night, he noticed their eyes alight with the firsthand gossip and the merriness of drink, and for whatever reason, he pictured the dog that had been bullied away from the body by the pigs. It had waited patiently around the whole time he was at the body, long after the pigs were gone, as though it was going to get another go and was just waiting for the opportunity. A hungry dog that was willing to wait; how often did you come across that?