Soul Trade

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Pete Caldecott sat on a tombstone, watching fog curl soft fingers against the graveyard earth and waiting for Mickey Martin’s ghost to appear.

Mickey Martin hadn’t always been a ghost, and before a hail of constable’s bullets had snuffed out his life in the winter of 1844, he’d managed to slit the throats of thirteen women.

Murderers weren’t supposed to be buried on consecrated ground, but with a bribe to the right vicar, Mickey Martin’s admirers made sure he got a proper burial. Even razor-wielding serial killers had their fans.

Mickey Martin professed to be a man of God, ridding the earth of wickedness, and in the poverty-stricken world of Victorian London, a bloke who went about slashing prostitutes and charwomen was looked on not as a monster, but as an avenging angel, cleaning the mud-choked streets of the East End of their filth.

Pete wasn’t usually the one who sat in chilly graveyards, waiting for the dead. Usually, that was Jack’s job. But Jack, the one who could see the dead with his second sight, the one who had all the talent when it came to disposing of the unnatural that crawled under cover of night in London, wanted nothing to do with the Mickey Martin business. Or, if Pete was honest, with much of anything lately.

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