The minutes of the Lazarus Club - By Tony Pollard Page 0,1
bodies in his time, many of them suicides who had thrown themselves off one of the bridges further upstream. Quite often they were sucked under almost immediately by the current and dragged downstream, to surface again only once they reached his beat. He had no idea how many of them remained submerged and made it all the way down the river to be expelled into the open sea beyond.
Clearing the river of dead bodies, or ‘floaters’, as they were known in the trade, was all part of his job as a waterman. Indeed, he was paid a small bonus for every corpse he fished from the water and delivered back to the land.
After edging the boat as far between the two barges as the gap would allow, he stood in the prow and used the boat hook to dislodge the birds, forcing them to continue their fight over the morsel elsewhere. Then he used it to lever back the board just enough to allow the corpse to slip free. As it came away the body rolled over on to its back. It was then that the stench hit him.
The black funk came straight from the charnelhouse and caused him to retch and his eyes to water. He knew from past experience that the sickly-sour smell of a human corpse is just as much a taste as it is a smell, but this was the worst he had ever experienced. This one must have been under for quite some time – retting like flax in the murky depths. When his eyes recovered he was horrified to see a further reason for the noisome stench. Where the chest had once been there was now a gaping chasm, two folds of ragged flesh lying open on either side of it like the pages of a book no one would ever care to read. Catching the hook under one of the armpits, he pulled the fleshy mass towards him, taking care to turn away when he needed to take a breath. What kind of accident could have caused that wound?
Using one of the rags in the bottom of the boat to cover his hand, he took hold of an arm slippery with corruption and pulled the corpse most of the way up the side of the boat before thinking better of it and letting it drop back into the water. There was no way he was going to have that thing on board. Instead he took one of the lengths of rope and looped it around a wrist before securing the other end to the stern.
Perhaps she had come into contact with a ship’s paddle wheel or one of the new-fangled screws? They’d make a mess of you all right. At times you could barely move out on the water, what with so much traffic plying its way backward and forward from the Pool of London.
He had tried not to look too hard but now, with her so close, he couldn’t help himself. There was enough of the face left to tell it was a woman and that that was no accidental injury. She’d been carved, deliberately cut open – slit from stem to stern. He’d seen murder before but nothing this bad.
Peering closer, he saw something dark glistening inside, something stirring in the cavity of her chest. Whatever it was began to thrash, sending out spurts of water. Then it sprang forth, uncoiling its sleek black body and launching itself at the waterman. He let out a yell and fell backwards, landing in the bottom of the boat alongside the dreadful thrashing form of the eel. Recovering himself, he tried to get a hold of the writhing creature, but it slipped away and wriggled between the objects in the hull. Eventually he managed to trap it in a shirt and, after wrapping it as best he could, he threw the garment and the eel as far away from the boat as possible. Within an instant the shirt had disappeared beneath the surface as the beast thrashed its way downward, for a while the best-dressed fish in the river.
Returning his attentions to the corpse, he checked his knots and, not being able to resist one last look, ascertained that there had been space for the eel in the poor woman’s chest because her organs – heart, lungs, everything – were missing. Surely to God the eel hadn’t eaten them? He thought he was going to be sick.