Gower Street Detective 04 - The Secrets of Gaslight Lane Read online

  I think we all jumped with the explosion and two horses pulling an omnibus shied, but Sidney Grice slipped the gun calmly away. The gelding fell limp, a neat round hole drowned in the scarlet well of dying.

  ‘It is still breathing,’ I whispered.

  ‘A reflex action.’ He peeled back the horse’s eyelid and touched its eye. It did not blink and I saw that the pupil was enormous already.

  ‘Good aim,’ the knacker’s man conceded. ‘’Tain’t easy to find an ’orse’s brain.’ He was already looping a canvas strap round the body.

  ‘Nor that of some drivers,’ I muttered, and we returned to our hansom.

  ‘Why are people so cruel to animals?’ I asked as Mr G tried to shake some of the mud off his clothes.

  He clambered in after me. ‘The horse would have suffered no worse a fate than Nathan Mortlock or any of the Garstang family,’ he observed.

  The gelding was being hauled up a plank ramp on to the back of a cart as we passed.

  ‘And we are supposed to be made in God’s image,’ I pondered. But Sidney Grice was never much interested in philosophizing.

  We turned left into Gower Street. Two chestnut sellers were scrapping over their pitch outside the hospital entrance and one man kicked the other’s bucket, spilling charcoal on to the wooden cobbles.

  ‘Some God,’ Mr G commented drily, and tossed two coins up through the hatch. The driver caught them deftly and released the catch.

  The workmen had gone but the hole was still there, covered with a tarpaulin and surrounded by a heap of earth ringed by a makeshift post and rail fence.

  ‘Interesting,’ my guardian said to himself and, before I could ask, poked his cane towards an area of yellow clay. ‘There is a set of footprints.’

  ‘There are a dozen sets of footprints,’ I pointed out.

  ‘A hundred and three prints made by five different pairs of boots,’ he corrected me. ‘But only this set goes towards the hole and does not return.’

  To me it looked like a muddy field trampled by a herd of cattle, albeit wearing boots.

  ‘I cannot imagine anyone would be sheltering in there.’ I looked again and could just about see what he meant – five or six small prints going over the large boots of the workmen. ‘It must be half full of sewage water.’

  ‘Pick up your corner.’ Sidney Grice stooped to take hold of his end and between us we re-enacted our uncovering of Nathan Mortlock on a larger, heavier, messier scale, foul water spilling over my legs as I heaved back the heavy canvas. The fumes were almost overwhelming.

  ‘My goodness, there is somebody in there.’ I hesitated as I heard a splash and then a series of them.

  ‘Hurry.’ Mr G ran up his side of the hole but I was almost knee-deep in the mud now, my skirts heavy with it and my boots nearly pulled from my feet.

  The hole was two-thirds exposed when I looked down and saw a dark shape ploughing through the stinking sludge and into a low arched tunnel.

  ‘It is all right. We will not harm you,’ I called.

  ‘We might,’ Sidney Grice contradicted me, ‘depending upon who you are and your intentions.’

  ‘Come back,’ I called in alarm as the figure disappeared.

  ‘Why?’ My godfather let his end fall. ‘Did you want to play?’

  ‘She could die in there.’ I was almost certain I saw a dress.

  I stared into the bricked hole as the sounds echoed and faded away.

  ‘Yes.’ He stepped back, only slightly muddied by his work, on to the pavement. ‘And I hate it when they do that. It blocks the drains.’

  I looked and listened for a while longer before I let go of my corner, feeling almost as if I had buried the unfortunate creature in there. And, when I tried to climb out, the clay was so heavy and adhesive that I could not.

  ‘Help me.’

  My guardian surveyed the mess that was me.

  ‘I will send Molly out,’ he decided.

  11

  ✥

  Swallowing Keys and the Unsavoury Snood

  THE DUMB WAITER had jammed and Molly was obliged to carry our breakfast upstairs over several trips the next morning. I did suggest that we ate at the table in his study, but my guardian would have none of it.

  ‘The day I concern myself about my servants’ convenience is the day I start making and taking them breakfast in bed,’ he forecast grimly.

  I laughed at my image of that, but before I could respond Molly burst in.

  ‘Oh, I’ve been up and down those stairs like a haddock,’ she puffed, depositing a china bowl on the sideboard.

  ‘There is a certain resemblance around the gills.’ Her employer tapped the spout with his fork. ‘More tea.’ And she drifted tiredly away.

  ‘What do you think that woman was up to in the hole yesterday?’ I cracked open my egg. It smelled fresh enough.

  Sidney Grice squeezed a slice of toast experimentally. ‘She was hiding,’ he announced as if that thought were profound.

  ‘From what?’ I reached for the salt.

  ‘Or whom,’ he added, but did not proffer a theory. ‘This toast is an impostor.’ He skimmed it into the fireplace.

  ‘Us?’ I suggested as my godfather selected another slice.

  ‘Why not?’ He crumbled this piece over his bowl. ‘We are superb people to hide from.’ Sidney Grice dripped prune juice from his spoon into the cloth. ‘There was something strangely unfamiliar about that woman.’

  ‘There must be hundreds of thousands of women unfamiliar to you,’ I reasoned, delving into my egg.

  ‘Indeed.’ He had crumbs over his nose. ‘But there was something strange about her unfamiliarity.’

  And, with that, the conversation was at an end. Sidney Grice opened his copy of Devlin’s Illustrated Guide to the Dissection of Tree Frogs at the page he had marked with the leaf of an aspidistra. Where the latter came from I had no idea, for he disliked having plants in the house.

  Molly returned wearily with a fresh pot and announced, ‘Cook says she’s sorry she broke the dim waiterer.’ She plonked the pot on the table. ‘But she needed a piece of strung to tie up the back door after she swallowed the key.’

  ‘How on earth did she manage that?’ I asked.

  ‘She cut it with a knife, of course,’ Molly explained, as one might to a simpleton.

  ‘No, I mean how did she manage to swallow the key?’

  Molly tutted. ‘She just sort of put herself back and dropped it in.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because it was a stupid thing to do,’ Mr G interjected. ‘What other reason does she need?’

  ‘Well, she was worried in case she ever got hikketyhups –’ Molly leaned on the back of a chair – ‘’cause she aintn’t not never had them.’

  ‘But you are supposed to put a key down your back for hiccups,’ I informed her and Molly snorted.

  ‘Cook ain’t not got no back.’ She rocked in mirth. ‘Her front goes all the way round.’

  ‘Why do you not just join us for breakfast?’ Sidney Grice sniffed. ‘You have dominated it so far.’

  ‘No thank you, sir,’ Molly declined. ‘Me and Cook ate all the good stuff before I brought yours up.’ She pinched her chin. ‘Only I dontn’t not think I was supposed to tell you that.’

  ‘I think you had better go, Molly.’ I glimpsed her employer’s jutting jaw.

  ‘You might be right, miss,’ she agreed, clearing an empty milk jug, and added in a whisper that would have carried to the gallery of Wilton’s Music Hall, ‘I think you must have upsetted him.’

  Molly hurried away.

  ‘What do you know about the massacre of the Garstang household?’ Sidney Grice asked as I refilled his cup.

  ‘Only what was in the papers and shockers at the time.’

  ‘Your father let you read about it?’ He popped his eye into a velvet pouch. The socket looked much cleaner since he had allowed me to bathe it for him, but the edges were still raw. ‘You were a child.’

  ‘My father rarely stopped me reading anything,’ I said. ‘He believed that the truth never hurt anyone.’

  ‘Leaving aside the scant opportunities of stumbling across anything approaching verisimilitude in the press,’ my guardian snorted, ‘I could name a sizeable crowd of criminals who have suffered tremendously because I discovered the truth about them.’ He plucked a vermilion patch out of his coat pocket and tied it behind his head.

  ‘It was their lies that hurt them,’ I argued. ‘If they had stuck to the truth they would not have been criminals.’

  But Mr G was bored with that conversation. He stood up, his face still sallow from a recent bout of fever. ‘Come immediately. We must adjourn to my study.’

  I rammed the last corner of toast into my mouth and followed him out of the room. It was always on stairs that my godfather’s shortened right leg was most apparent. He bobbed and weaved about like a lightweight avoiding punches, until he reached the hall.

  ‘Do try to keep up,’ he urged as I struggled not to trip on my skirts and kill us both.

  Sidney Grice hurried to a filing cabinet on the back left and flicked through a row of large brown envelopes.

  ‘Here they are.’ He heeled the drawer shut and upended the contents on to his desk.

  ‘What are?’ I went over to have a look.

  ‘My records of the 1872 multiple killings.’ The leather top was scattered with documents. ‘The investigation was led by the unscrupulous and unsavoury Chief Inspector Snood Mulholland, who died, I am delighted to recall, in the Coram Street fire five years and nine days ago, but this should interest you.’ He jabbed his finger to the third column of a cutting from The Times.

  ‘The coroner then heard from Sergeant Pound, who was the first police officer to attend the scene,’ I read out before he whipped the paper away. ‘I assume that is the man we know as an inspector now.’

  ‘He had only just been promoted from the ranks,’ my guardian confirmed. ‘So this was his first big case, though I have never heard him speak of it.’

  ‘He must have been a very young sergeant.’ I browsed the article.

  ‘George Pound was the bright-eyed boy of Marylebone.’ Sidney Grice whipped the paper from my hand. ‘Until he besmirched his reputation.’

  ‘But how?’ This did not sound like the Pound I knew.

  ‘He raided a house of ill-repute, only to discover two senior police officers availing themselves of its services.’

  ‘I wonder if he could tell us anything that would cast light on this case,’ I said.

  Sidney Grice leafed through a stack of handwritten notes bound together with red string.

  ‘It is a simple matter to satisfy your curiosity.’ He smoothed out a dog-eared top corner. ‘Indeed you may get the opportunity today if Pound is there, for we have an appointment with Quigley at eleven o’clock.’

  I went upstairs to get ready and smoke out of my bedroom window.

  ‘Oh, George,’ I said involuntarily.

  After Edward died I never thought I could suffer love again or feel this sort of pain. The cigarette did not make things any better. Nor did it make them any worse.

  And afterwards I sucked on a parma violet. It would not fool my guardian but I felt I had a duty to try.

  12

  ✥

  The Mad Girl and Lord Alphreton’s Son

  IT WAS NOT far to Marylebone Police Station, but a wagon loaded with bales of rags had broken its axle on a pothole in Tottenham Court Road and there was hardly room for one vehicle at a time to squeeze by. We were lucky to be there soon after the accident because, by the time we had negotiated it, the whole street was choking with traffic behind us.

  ‘The roots of the problem are idleness and bloated wage packets,’ Mr G pronounced. ‘If the lower orders were made to walk instead of frittering money on omnibuses we would not have one-third of this vehicular congestion.’

  ‘But you rarely walk anywhere,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I am a gentleman.’

  A man dressed as a Red Indian, with a dyed goose-feather headdress and bearing a longbow, was balancing cross-legged on a platform on top of a totem pole, and a girl painted crimson, with a frayed headband, was skipping round the base rattling a tin for money, but the only people showing any interest were throwing rubbish from a bin to try to knock the man off.

  ‘So was my father and he walked everywhere,’ I pointed out.

  A youth in a battered mauve hat lobbed a potato and it struck the Indian on the cheek. The Indian jerked in surprise but stayed in place.

  ‘What are you doing?’ my guardian demanded as I banged on the roof with my umbrella.

  The road ahead was clear now. There was a cold drizzle in the air, not enough to soak us, but enough to make it difficult to look straight ahead and more than sufficient for the few carefully arranged strands of hair outside my hat to cling limply to my cheek.

  ‘Sixpence if you can knock that mauve topper off,’ I called up, and the driver’s long whip snaked out. It stung the youth on the nape of his neck, coiled round his hat and sent it spinning into the gutter. The youth yelped and put a hand to the weal that instantly appeared. After a light flick on the horse we trotted on.

  The hatch slid open and our cabby leaned over it. ‘’Ow was that for you?’

  ‘Worth a shilling,’ I replied and Mr G rolled his eye.

  ‘Why are you always interfering in matters that do not concern you?’

  ‘I do not like bullies,’ I told him and he hugged his satchel.

  ‘Neither do I.’ We jolted over some raised cobbles. ‘But you are inflating the cost of retribution. The driver would have done that for tuppence. He might have even done it for fun – whatever that may be.’

  The main hall at Marylebone Police Station was crowded.

  ‘We tried to break up a bare-knuckle fight,’ Horwich, the desk sergeant recounted, ‘in an old warehouse down Drummond Street, only there was a lot of money resting on Biggs and ’e was winning ’ands down when we arrived.’

  ‘Your gov’ner ’ad tin on Crosby,’ a stumpy, snub-nosed man with a busted nose swore. ‘Uvawise you’d ’ave stopped it in round eight when Biggs was on the floor free times.’

  ‘The only thing my super would specularate on is ’ow long you’re going to be locked up for.’ The sergeant acknowledged Sidney Grice. ‘Inspector Quigley said to send you straightways to his office.’

  We walked down the long corridor. Inspector Pound’s office door was closed and I hoped it would stay that way. My wounds were still raw and I was not sure that I could mask the pain if we were brought face to face. His colleague’s door, the next one along, was ajar, and Inspector Quigley sat working his way through a neat stack of forms and writing along the top of one of them.

  ‘Mr Grice.’ He did not rise and neither man proffered his hand. ‘And your mad girl, I see.’

  ‘Do not worry,’ I assured him. ‘I have not attacked a policeman for over a week now.’

  I was pleased to see that the inspector had grown a short beard to hide the mark left when I had stabbed him under the chin with a pen. It did not suit him at all as I hoped to get the opportunity to point out.

  Sidney Grice dusted a chair with his gloves and the two men sat facing each other across the desk.

  ‘Gethsemane,’ Mr G said, with no preliminary courtesies. ‘Gaslight Lane.’

  I lifted some files off a rickety stool in the corner and dragged it over to perch beside my guardian.

  ‘What’s your interest?’ Quigley’s hair was oiled flat from a low side parting.

  ‘His daughter has engaged my services.’

  I was under the impression that she had employed both of us.

  ‘Miss Mortlock does not think you are making any progress,’ I told the inspector and he threw me a malignant glare.

  ‘That woman thinks the entire Metropolitan Police force should put all its resources into one crime,’ he retorted acidly. ‘But I have five other killings on the go already, including that of Lord Alphreton’s son, who takes priority over them all.’

  ‘So a titled man’s death is more important than a commoner’s?’ I demanded and Quigley fleered.

  ‘Of course.’

  There was a cold draught on the side of my neck.

  ‘Do you have any suspects?’ Mr G ran his fourth finger over the mark of an old mug on the pine top.

  ‘Too many,’ the inspector replied. ‘Three, to be precise, and evidence against them all.’

  ‘What kind of evidence?’ I asked.

  The window looked through a cream-painted grille on to the smoke-stained brick wall of the next building, across a blind passageway. The gap was too narrow for a man to pass along, but it served to let in a little light. The top sash had been pulled down six inches, allowing the ceaseless hubbub of London to enter in streams of cold and filthy air.

  ‘It must have been an insider.’ Quigley talked on as if I had not spoken. ‘Gethsemane is like a fortress, every window barred and every door locked and bolted. Even the loft hatch was secured.’

  ‘No secret panels then?’ Both men ignored me.

  ‘Don’t even know how the killer got in or out of the room,’ the inspector admitted. ‘The door was bolted on the inside.’

  ‘So who was in Gethsemane that night?’ Mr G traced the loop of an ink stain out to where it disappeared under a clean new blotter.

  ‘All servants,’ Quigley told him. ‘There’s the footman, the maid – she’s foreign so she has to top the list – and the housekeeper, who doubles up as cook since the last one left after Christmas. Mortlock’s daughter wasn’t living with him and the valet was away seeing his sick mother. That’s a funny one – exactly the same alibi as he used last time, but it’s well supported.’

  ‘Alibis are like iron.’ Mr G ran his finger back again. ‘The stronger they are, the more likely it is they have been forged.’

  ‘What kind of evidence?’ I repeated more loudly and Mr G tugged at his scarred earlobe.