nauseous. 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 wore 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 that which had been on 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 sat to the side with a wet red snout awaiting his turn having been forced out by the much larger and more aggressive animals. What was not red or mud coloured of Olocher’s skin was blue white and looked as though it would be hard to the touch. It was not possible to tell if those who took the body had done any injury to it any more.
At the infirmary, Alderman James looked over the wreckage of the body. The surgeon had left him alone, leaving gruffly and 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 him now, he 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 in relation to other crimes reported to him. Thomas Olocher may have been the most notorious of Dublin criminals this season, but he was by no means the only one, he was not even the only murderer on the prowl. This was the case he was looking at now, three murders on the north side of Dublin all around Haymarket. This seemed an open and shut case, and the guilty party was known to him and would be easy to find if he tried to run. The new worry was the public reaction now; 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 that spread like wildfire (it had to be said mostly from the higher classes) 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 murder he thought of now, would have to be tried quickly and hanged just as quickly and with proper arrangements made for where he was to go before 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 he couldn’t help but see the remnants of Olocher’s limbs and innards as he looked at the food. 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 was all in a day’s work, and the case was no different to those he generally worked on. He changed the subject to other crimes frequently only to see it ramble back to the same point it had started.
As he saw his guests out that