The Reckoning
One killer with everything to lose. One man with nothing to fear.The 6th historical thriller featuring Matthew Hawkwood, Bow Street Runner and Spy, now hunting a killer on the loose in Regency London.London, 1813: Bow Street Runner Matthew Hawkwood is summoned to a burial ground and finds the corpse of a young woman, murdered and cast into an open grave.At first the death is deemed to be of little consequence. But when Chief Magistrate James Read receives a direct order from the Home Office to abandon the case, Hawkwood’s interest is piqued.His hunt for the killer will lead him from London’s backstreets into the heart of a government determined to protect its secrets at all costs. Only Hawkwood’s contacts within the criminal underworld can now help.As the truth behind the girl’s murder emerges, setting in motion a deadly chain of events, Hawkwood learns the true meaning of loyalty – and that the enemy is much closer to home than he ever imagined…
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The Reckoning
JAMES McGEE
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
Copyright © James McGee 2017
James McGee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photograph © Mark Owen / Arcangel Images
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2017 ISBN: 9780007320127
SOURCE ISBN: 9780007507665
Version 2018-07-03
Table of Contents
It was late evening and in the Hanged Man trade was brisk, which wasn’t surprising, given the weather outside. Rain had been falling on and off most of the day and there was nothing more welcoming on a wet winter’s night than a crackling fire to warm the bones, a swig of brandy to comfort the soul and perhaps a wager or two to while away the time.
The tavern was situated – some would say hidden – in an alleyway behind Buckbridge Street and thus it did not cater for what other, more salubrious, establishments might have termed a passing trade. The Hanged Man was for locals. It wasn’t somewhere you stumbled upon by accident.
The western end of Buckbridge Street was only a stone’s throw from Oxford Street; not in itself a notorious address, but it was the area that lay beyond the street’s eastern border, trapped between Broad Street to the south and Great Russell Street to the north, which deterred those citizens of a more upstanding character from venturing uninvited into its shadowy maw.
Covering close to ten acres, the St Giles Rookery was a fetid maze of crumbling tenements, roofless hovels, dank cellars, crooked passageways and rat-infested sewers. To law-abiding Londoners it was a filthy, festering sore; a canker eating away at the city’s heart. To its inhabitants – those who were seen as living on the more disreputable fringes of society – it was home. The Hanged Man was a refuge within a refuge.
On the ground floor, dense tobacco fumes rising from the tables had merged with the smoke from the hearth to form an opaque layer of fog which sat suspended between windowsill and ceiling. A hubbub of conversation and coarse laughter filled the room. In one corner, close to the fire, a fiddler – blind in one eye and seemingly oblivious to the din around him – was attempting to scrape out a tune on an instrument in dire need of a new set of strings. At his feet, a small wire-coated terrier rested its head on its paws, while his immediate neighbour, a drunken moll, sprawled half in and half out of her chair, her large, blue-veined breasts spilling like opened sacks of lard from her part-fastened bodice.
Reached by a staircase leading up from the back of the taproom, the first floor was noticeably quieter. At a table next to the rear window, a game of dominoes was in progress. Relaxed and unbothered by the sounds filtering from below, the four players studied the pattern of tiles laid out on the table before them; each man ruminating over his hand and the move he was about to make.
“Jesus, Del, you’ve been lookin’ at those bloody bones for ’alf an hour. How long’s it goin’ to take?”
The speaker, a balding, morose-looking individual with stubbled jowls and a silver ring in his right ear, rolled his eyes towards his other two companions in exaggerated disbelief.
“I’m thinkin’, ain’t I?” the player to his left protested. Of a similar age to the speaker, but with a fuller face and salt-and-pepper hair, he wrinkled his brow as he contemplated his remaining tiles and scratched his chin with the edge of a stubby thumb.
“Well, think faster. God knows, I ain’t gettin’ any younger.”
“You take your time, my son.” It was the bearded player to the speaker’s right who spoke. “Jasper’s only narked ’cos he’s down a bob. If he was up, he wouldn’t be botherin’.”
