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— they’ve stove in his head! God rot them in Hell — God rot you too — it’s all your doing!”
    â€œMy doing?” Mr Comrie stepped out of the surgery, perplexed.
    â€œYour fault — his — the other one — Atherton! The bastard lot of you!”
    â€œIf you won’t make sense, I can’t help you. Who are you, woman, and what has happened?”
    â€œFoul filthy murder has happened! They’ve killed my Jemmy!”
    Meg Nancarrow cursed wildly, and burst into tears.
    4
    They’d lugged Jemmy Cheese to the Giltspur Street Compter. It had taken Meg all morning to find that out, after learning from Little Hollis what had happened at the graveyard. Rushing to Giltspur Street she had found him alive but very bad indeed, so bad it could hardly be worse. She’d dashed to St Bart’s to fetch a surgeon, but none seemed inclined to come running, just to save the life of a Resurrection Man. Somebody gave her Mr Comrie’s name, and his address at Cripplegate.
    â€œAye,” he grunted. “I’ll come.”
    â€œThen hurry, damn you!”
    He reached for his jacket — the one he wore for going out, with fewer stains. I followed with the pocket set of instruments, wrapped in leather, that we took with us on calls.
    Giltspur Street Compter is at the east end of St Sepulchre’s, just north of Newgate and no more than a stone’s throw from the Fortune of War, where Jemmy’s tribulations had begun. The Compter mainly held wretches arrested for Debt, but night charges were often brought in as well, since the Watch-houses were not permitted to retain prisoners. It was the Watch as had brought Jemmy here.
    They’d been drawn by the hullabaloo in the graveyard — so Meg Nancarrow had pieced together. The coachman’s friends had been set to hang him, as was done to that Resurrectionist in Dublin, except they thought they’d beaten him to death already. “Hang him anyway!” someone cried. But others weren’t so certain, and two or three began to ask themselves whether killing a man was precisely what they’d had in mind, and whether the Law might not have something to say on the subject. Such was the state of affairs when two elderly Charleys creaked up with their bull’s-eyes and their long staves, exclaiming “here-now-here-now” and “God’s teeth!” As the pack began to scatter, the Watchmen commandeered the donkey-cart of an early-rising costermonger, and trundled Jemmy Cheese to Giltspur Street.
    â€œThey reckoned he’d be dead, the bastards.” Meg spoke in ragged bursts as we hastened. “Dead and cold by the time they arrived, and they could take him to St Bart’s and sell him to the surgeons.” A look of incandescent accusation. “Sell him to the likes of you.”
    Mr Comrie took this sort of thing in stride, having been cursed by shrieking Lobsters halfway across Southern Europe. By 187 of them in a single day, after Salamanca. But I tended to take things more personal, on his behalf.
    â€œThe likes of him,” I said, “is haring across the Metropolis to help you.”
    â€œI know that!”
    She was so full of distress that she had to put it somewhere, so she’d grown furious instead. Here was my golden opportunity to leave well enough alone, and naturally I passed it up.
    â€œHaring across the Metropolis,” I repeated, deciding I liked the sound. I have a weakness for the mellifluous syllable, and a magpie’s eye for shiny words such as mellifluous , which I’d found just the other night in Sam Johnson’s dictionary. “And what’s he likely to be paid for all his trouble?”
    â€œPayment!” cried Meg. “Now we come to it, do we?”
    â€œNo one’s consairned with payment,” said Mr Comrie.
    But he was beginning to fluster, cos she’d stopped right there in front of him. In the middle of