Blood Tribute (The Lucas Gedge Thrillers Book 1) (9 page)

H
annah dimly recalled being blindfolded
and bundled into a hansom. She had felt so weak and drowsy, barely able to put one foot in front of another, let alone offer any resistance. On the trip, she remembered orders barked by a male voice to the cab driver, and the occasional higher-pitched words of a woman. She had no clear idea how long they had been travelling, before she was ushered out and then jostled up a few steps, into a building, then up two flights of stairs. She stumbled part-way up and was roughly jerked back to her feet. A door in front of her was opened. She was shoved inside and thrown onto what turned out to be a bed with a mean, thin mattress. She felt wiry fingers working to bind her wrists to the frame of the headboard behind her, and then a piece of foul-smelling material was placed over her mouth and nose, and she blacked out.

W
hen she came to
, the blindfold was still in place and her arms ached dreadfully. Although she was no longer in a stupor, she felt as tired as though she’d been awake for days. She stifled the urge to scream, to try and alert someone to her predicament. Then she thought of her father, and the violence and killing that he’d seen, and the nightmares that he still had, and told herself not to be such a silly thing. If she made too much of a nuisance of herself, they might punish her in some way, even kill her. Better to keep quiet for now, and see what she could learn about her situation. Keep her powder dry, as her father might have said.

Her legs were not tied up, and she wriggled about, stretching and flexing, to get some blood moving through her veins. The movement felt good.

She heard something from across the room, and tilted her head. Someone was giggling, likely at her.

‘Who’s there?’

The giggler seemed to find it hard to get any words out. ‘Hello. I’m sorry, my name’s Esther. You’ve made me laugh with that funny wriggling. I never thought I would laugh again.’

‘Hello, Esther. I’m Hannah. Were you taken as well?’

‘Yes. I’ve been stuck in this dump for two days now.’

‘What do they intend to do with us?’

‘I don’t know but I’m… Be quiet! Someone’s coming!’

Hannah heard steps approaching. She straightened out her legs and lay back, as the door was unlocked and opened. She felt someone leaning over her and braced herself, but then the blindfold was untied and whipped away. Even though the room had no artificial light, she was blinded for a few moments, before registering her surroundings.

It was a small and grimy bedroom; the two beds were squashed in with a tiny table and one wardrobe opposite. The window bore heavy curtains, and was covered with metal bars, preventing anything wider than a few inches from passing through. Standing between the beds, looking down at her, was a thin woman in her fifties, with grey hair and sleeves rolled up, exposing surprisingly muscular forearms. Beside her, and a full six inches taller, was a man with black hair and beard and a broken nose. He regarded Hannah with a narrow smile.

The woman spoke first. ‘Awake now, are you? Well, let me explain a few things. My name’s Vera, and I’m the housekeeper. You’re going to be here several days, so you’d better get used to it. I’m gonna untie your wrists in a minute, but in case you’ve got any ideas about gettin’ funny and tryin’ to escape, forget about it. For a start, a soft little thing like you won’t get the drop on me however hard you try. Plus, this door will be locked and bolted from the outside the whole time, and the window’s barred. There’s a commode over in the corner. You’ll get something to eat later.’

‘What are you going to do with us?’

The man replied. ‘Let’s just say, when you leave here, you’ll be destined for greater things. Mind your Ps and Qs and do what your betters ask and you might have a cushy number on the cards. But act up, and it won’t go so well for you.

‘I know your father, by the way. Yes, we met some years ago. Quite an occasion it was. Made an impression on me, and I’ve never forgotten about him.’

‘If you know my father, how can you be doing this to me? Keeping me prisoner here?’

‘Oh, I didn’t say I liked him, miss. Quite the contrary. No, it’ll be pleasurable to catch up with him, but I’m not aiming to swap pleasantries, if you get my drift.’

‘Who are you?’

‘The name’s Ackerman, miss.’

He produced an exaggerated bow and they both swept out, securing the door behind them.

Hannah found herself looking across at a girl very much like herself, but with long blonde hair. She realised that Esther was staring at her with a look of abject fear.

‘Hannah, they’re going to kill us, aren’t they?’

B
ethnal Green Road
ran roughly east to west, to the north of Spitalfields. Gedge stood on the corner of a side street, opposite a narrow-fronted building whose ground floor was occupied by Mayer’s Coffee House. It was now the evening of the day after Hannah’s abduction, and the café was doing a good trade, as patrons hurried inside to line their stomachs with piping hot beverages.

 There was quite a hubbub inside Mayer’s. The warmth was certainly welcome, and the air was suffused with a heady mixture of coffee, spice and tobacco aromas. Most of the tables were taken and all the serving staff were busy with customers. That was ideal for Gedge; he was able to quietly open a side door and slip through it unseen.

He carefully made his way up to the first floor and a landing with three doors. One was standing open, revealing a storeroom. The other two doors were shut. According to Rondeau, the one with the black doorknob was Frowde’s “bolt-hole”.

Gedge listened, but heard no sound other than the clinking of cups and jabber of conversation from below. He only needed a minute for his skeleton keys to pick the lock.

Inside, he found a single room, with a sink in one corner and several threadbare items of furniture dotted about. A desk against the opposite wall was piled high with papers. He pushed aside a heavy brass lamp and sifted through the stack. After a while, he realised that Frowde had stuck handwritten labels on the wooden partitions at the back of the desk. One read
Disappearances
. This section contained a manila folder full of newspaper cuttings, along with a bundle of letters and a notebook.

He scanned through the cuttings first. They were mostly from editions covering the last few months, but there were some dating from five years previously. A variety of London and national newspaper titles were represented, but Gedge noticed that many of the recent pieces were from
Lloyd’s Weekly
, under Frowde’s own byline.

Sorting the Frowde pieces into a separate pile, he read through them. None of them was a front-page story. A dozen articles featured disappearances of girls in east London, dating from the late spring through to a few weeks ago. Frowde had ferreted out information on eight girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three, who had disappeared in “mysterious circumstances”. He implied, more than proved, that they had been abducted for nefarious purposes, and in the later articles, Frowde suggested that the eight incidents were linked. No real evidence was presented for the theory.

The remaining three pieces by Frowde, all from the last month, covered recent public scandals involving the judiciary and the police. Gedge thought he remembered the hue and cry about those events, but as far as he knew, it had died down some time ago. It all looked to him like a journalist trying to reheat an old story when he can’t find anything new to report.

Shaking his head, he placed the bundle of cuttings back in the box and turned his attention to the letters. He was disappointed to realise that the three letters were not in fact written in English, but in a language he took to be Dutch. He would just have to get them translated by someone, Rondeau’s name coming to mind. He assumed his new friend would have a great command of languages.

The only item left in the partition was the notebook. It had a green leather cover, embossed with the label 
Harry Frowde.
The majority of the book contained notes on earlier stories that were of no interest.

The last few pages he had written dealt with his final case. There were summaries of the newspaper cuttings, but these revealed no new information. Frustratingly, there seemed to be no mention of the foreign correspondence; perhaps Frowde was waiting for a translation himself. The last page of the notebook that contained writing was the one that caught Gedge’s attention:

I
t surprised
Gedge that there wasn’t more here. On the face of it, there was very little to go on: not much more than they already knew. Frowde had indicated a Belgian connection, and he named Ackerman explicitly, but he seemed to have made no progress on any other individuals. Gedge wasn’t surprised by Frowde’s apparent distrust of the police, and it made sense that he should see Rondeau—and himself—as potential allies. But two things stood out: “Link to Society”, and the name Musgrave.

Gedge sat back on the bed, pondering. He would have to show this material to Rondeau and see if he had any shafts of light to shed on them.

As he started to collect the papers and notebook together, Gedge heard a creaking on the staircase outside the room, then another. Someone was climbing the stairs slowly, but was not taking care to walk on the very inside edge of each step—as he had—in order to minimise noise.

There was just the one pair of feet, a heavy tread. Quietly, he stood up, and carefully positioned himself behind the hinge side of the door.

The footsteps reached the room and stopped. The door swung open. Gedge waited for the person to fully enter the room.

With all his weight, he rammed the door into the newcomer’s side. With a grunt, the figure crashed onto the floor, and Gedge leapt on top, his hands grappling with the man’s arms and his knees pinning his legs.

A gleaming object, which Gedge assumed to be a knife, was knocked clear and thrown onto the carpet, several feet away.

A shabby hat had been knocked off, and he could see the man was totally bald. His ears were deformed, shrivelled as though melted to the side of his head. Gedge could now feel the strength of the other man as he struggled beneath him. He realised that this was an immense physical specimen, both taller and more solidly built than himself. Gedge’s grip was loosening, as the man exerted considerable force to break free. A straight contest of strength was not going to work.

In the middle of what had become a vicious fight, he felt like an idiot, an amateur caught out. He was not fit enough or sharp enough. When he had heard the footsteps on the stairs, he had unconsciously assumed his opponent would be some raggedy street ruffian with little skill or appetite for the rough stuff. That mistake might cost him his life. Even as he looked desperately around for something to get him out of this fix, he vowed not to make the same error again.

He looked at the dagger, lying invitingly, as if waiting for one or the other to put it to decisive use. In one movement he released his grip on the giant’s arms and threw himself towards it. But the other man was quick as well as big. As Gedge went for the knife, the man kicked out, hitting him solidly in the stomach and sending him flying into the iron bed-post.

He was winded and slow to regain his feet. As he struggled up, the giant also lurched upright, his great paw scooping up the knife. A smile broke out across his scarred features. It was a face of simian cunning, the jaw outlined by a fuzzy black beard. He advanced towards Gedge, flourishing the blade.

The giant lunged forward, his long right arm swinging the knife. Gedge evaded the slash and retreated, but tripped over a chair behind him and fell to the floor again. The other man leapt at him, but Gedge rolled away and kicked his opponent in the face.

Struggling to his feet again, he glanced at the desk and noticed the lamp. As the giant ran at him, looking to pin him to the wall, Gedge wrenched the heavy lamp from the desk and swung it with all his strength. It careened off the man’s shoulder and diverted his momentum so that he plunged past Gedge and stumbled straight towards the window. The giant’s weight sent his head and upper body straight through the glass, shattering the wooden window bars like matchsticks, until the bulk of his mid-section came to a shuddering halt, jammed in the frame.

As Gedge cautiously approached, he realised the man was impaled on the glass shards that were still fixed into the bottom of the frame. Blood seeped over the sill and onto the floor. His body was still.

Gedge looked over the man, through the smashed top of the window, and saw several horrified people looking up from the street below.

There was no time to be wasted. Gedge donned his coat, and seeing a likely-looking box-file on the desk, emptied out its contents and refilled it with the cuttings, letters and notebook.

Wedging the box-file under his arm, he ran down the stairs. At the bottom, instead of going for the door into the coffee shop and out into the street, he slipped behind the staircase and through an open door into the café’s kitchen. He tore past a sweating cook, who hollered after him, and out into a narrow back alley. Reaching the end of the passage, he glanced back and was relieved that nobody was giving chase. From there, it was straightforward to track back homewards.

C
laude Rondeau had so
many contacts, in Britain and abroad, that he kept their details in a series of huge ledgers. The notes within were written in code, and the key to the code was in Rondeau’s head. Although he had a prodigious memory anyway, he had used the tomes extensively in his research, looking for connections and any insights that might lead to identifying the members of the trafficking gang.

He hardly needed to consult a ledger for the details of Inspector Jack Cross, one of the few policemen in London he trusted. He had encountered Cross on a number of occasions and knew him to be scrupulous and rigorous, his outlook on life informed by his Quaker beliefs. In fact, Cross’s police career had been held back because of his refusal to take bribes and turn his back on dubious practices, and his lack of interest in joining the Freemasons, as so many of his colleagues had done. Viewed suspiciously by his superiors, he had developed a thick skin that allowed him to ignore the dark stares and cold shoulders he received on the job. The fact that he was stationed at Leman Street, the headquarters of H Division, made him a man Rondeau needed to talk to about the current situation, especially since he had recently interviewed Gedge about Hannah’s disappearance.

Cross sat opposite Rondeau in a bay window in The Anchor, an ancient coaching inn, on Shadwell High Street, near to Shadwell New Basin and the other docks. It was a secluded position within a secluded pub. Few ventured here from outside the dock area, yet it was not known for violence or any particular criminality. Conversation at their table was unlikely to be overheard. Cross favoured an unusually long coat, and he had it tucked around him, against a draught flowing across the alcove. He regarded Rondeau with his still, grey eyes.

‘You realise the historical significance of this area?’ said Cross. ‘We’re close to the location of the Ratcliffe Highway murders.’

‘Yes indeed, inspector. A landmark in the criminal history of London. Nearly eighty years ago now, and a plethora of hideous crimes since. Yet those events retain an enduring fascination. Some parallels with today as well. It is likely that the man Williams did not commit those murders, and so a celebrated murder-spree becomes a celebrated travesty of justice. Or it would do, if enough people knew about it.’

Cross frowned. ‘I hope you haven’t invited me here to regale me with the failings of the police force. I have my own views about that, which I am not about to discuss with you, Claude. You already know my situation could become even more difficult if I’m seen in the company of someone such as yourself. Even though I know you desire justice more passionately than many in the force, I thought it necessary to meet in this out-of-the-way dive.’

‘I apologise, Jack. I did not mean to antagonise you. As Polly says, I should temper my intellectual flights of fancy.’

‘How is your daughter?’

‘Very well, thank you. Now, can we turn to the reason for my request to meet you?’

‘I assumed it was to do with the man Lucas Gedge.’

‘Yes. I hope you didn’t mind me sending you that note of reference. For what it is worth, in my brief association with him, I believe Lucas is a good man. I know that, as a policeman, you must have suspicions about him, regarding his daughter’s abduction.’

Cross took a sip from his pint glass. ‘It’s true that from my perspective his position has some weakness. Having just returned after years away, with no job. All too easy to imagine what might have transpired if he had come back to be spurned by wife and daughter, especially if his mind was not the most stable. It’s all too common. But I’m satisfied that such a thing didn’t happen. I’ve just spoken to his wife, and nothing she said suggests this was anything to do with him. And yes, your opinion does have weight.’

‘I am glad. Lucas told you about our suspicions regarding this man Ackerman and the disappearances of East End girls over these last few months?’

‘As outlined in the recent articles by Mr Harry Frowde in
Lloyd’s Weekly?
As far as Frowde is concerned, it’s a hobby-horse of his. I’ve met him, Frowde. He wanted to interview me once. Background and all that flimflam. Struck me as a typical hack on the make. Believe me, there’s not been enough to link those events, certainly not enough for us to take seriously his claims that there’s a gang abducting the girls for criminal purposes. Do you know how many women, how many people come to that, go missing in this fair city in a year? Having said that of course, the abduction of Miss Gedge adds new urgency to the matter.’

‘Very much so, Jack. There are, of course, common factors among the girls we are talking about. They are all aged sixteen to twenty-three, were all abducted from the boroughs traditionally called the East End, and all of them are from middle-class homes, not the lower classes who are more prone to these sorts of crimes.’

‘I know, but up until now, there’s been no evidence of a trafficking gang. No connections that we can find. The information regarding this Ackerman may be significant, but so far we have no idea how to find him.’

‘But it is also worrying that Frowde himself has gone missing, as you know.’

‘I looked over his flat. Obviously tossed. I imagine that someone has put the frighteners on our newspaperman. Let’s hope he’s just gone to ground.’

‘I concur. Especially as he is one of my associates.’

Cross shook his head. ‘I should have known you were going to say that. You’ve been paying him to investigate the missing girls?’

‘Nothing so vulgar. As you said, hopes of fame are a heady drug for Mr Frowde. I just feed him information. Are you investigating his case?’

‘It’s hardly a case at all. He’s only been gone for two days. We’ve looked at the flat and talked to his colleagues at the paper. Not much else we can do at this point. He didn’t seem to have a large circle of friends, I can tell you that.’

‘I see. I wanted to ask if you would accept a little assistance in the matter of Miss Gedge’s abduction?’

Cross furrowed his brow. ‘What might you mean by that?’

‘Oh, purely in the form of intelligence. You are aware that I may be able to, as you might say, “ferret out” more information than you will find yourselves?’

‘Just as long as there’s no suggestion that Mr Gedge will try to take action himself. I’m well aware of his military background.’

‘Oh, no. I quite believe him when he says he was put off violence of any kind by his experiences in Afghanistan.’ Rondeau rubbed his beard as he spoke. ‘I still hope he will be able to help me in a more passive role, however. Tell me, Jack, how are things at Leman Street these days? Generally, I mean.’

Cross smiled. ‘Always after the info, eh, Claude? Well, obviously I’m not part of the inner circle, or privy to the rumblings of the uniformed officers. There’s always been tension for one reason or other, since ’88. The last couple of months we’ve had Special Branch camped out in the station, taking up a couple of offices while they nose about. What they’re up to is top secret of course. Just adds to the sense of unease, to be honest.’

‘Special Branch. That is the unit originally set up to combat the Fenian threat, is it not?’

‘Correct. They now have a more general remit. A juicy enough nugget for you?’

Rondeau chuckled. ‘I know I am incorrigible, Jack. Thank you for indulging me. Turning back to the urgent situation we are faced with, I believe everything we have talked about is linked. The disappearances of the girls and Mr Frowde, the abduction of Miss Gedge, and the shadow cast by Ackerman. And there is another factor: if we accept his involvement, how did Ackerman know of Gedge’s arrival back in England, and the movements of his daughter? Whoever is carrying out these crimes must have some backing from somewhere inside the establishment.’

‘There you go again. Unfortunately, in this day and age it’s hardly an unbelievable suggestion. But as far as the police are concerned, we can only proceed when we have evidence.’

Rondeau took a puff on his pipe. ‘It is a problem for you. Not being able to take action until a prescribed amount of information is entered in the ledger.’

Cross frowned at this. ‘It may be irritating, but what’s the alternative? Even more miscarriages of justice? If we don’t have the evidence, we can’t act. It’s as simple as that. The rule of law has to mean something.’

‘And so the few, like yourself, have your hands tied behind your back, in contrast to the criminals and the more venal officials who have both authority and a disregard for the very principles they purport to uphold.’

Cross rose to his feet, obviously annoyed at the turn the conversation had taken. ‘I’m not going to argue about this again. I hope you’re not implying that others, private individuals, should “take action” as you put it? Because that would be criminal in itself, and only serve to make matters worse. As to your suspicions, I’ll keep my ears open. As I said, I’m unlikely to pick up anything at the station. But you never know. One of my snitches, perhaps.’

Rondeau smiled at him. ‘Jack, I apologise for upsetting you. It is just the urgency of the matter for my friend. Anyway, I wish you well in your detecting, and I hope to see you soon.’

They parted on good terms, but Cross tramped slowly downstairs as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders. It probably felt like it was.

Rondeau smiled as he watched him leave. Cross was a good man in a bad place. He had known him for years, since before the Ripper business. He was transferred from B Division in Chelsea, and at first advanced rapidly through the ranks, being promoted to inspector in 1887. It was during the Ripper’s reign of terror the following year that he started to cause ripples of concern among his colleagues and superiors. He made some comments that the investigation seemed to be trying to pin the crimes on pathetic figures such as Aaron Kosminski and “Leather Apron”. Cross considered these individuals to be living, breathing caricatures of the sort of “outsider” that the public would imagine had done the crimes, but did not have the capabilities to do so. From his admittedly limited knowledge of the case, Cross thought that more attention should have been given to the indications that the very heart of Victorian society was implicated. His concerns were soon lost among the welter of conflicting information and opinions concerning the case. Since then, he had become more alienated from the bulk of H Division’s officers, due to his refusal to compromise on ethical matters.

Cross was trying to combat injustice from his lonely office in Leman Street, from within the system, and Rondeau applauded him for doing so. But the older man was increasingly coming to believe that radical solutions were required for some of the world’s ills; solutions that would involve private individuals. Even if the letter of the law was not adhered to.