Read India Black Online

Authors: Carol K. Carr

Tags: #London (England) - History - 1800-1950, #England, #Brothels - England - London, #Mystery & Detective, #Brothels, #General, #london, #International Relations, #Fiction, #Spy stories

India Black (6 page)

BOOK: India Black
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“The case?” I asked.
“The black leather portfolio.”
I stared at him blankly.
He gestured impatiently. “Latham’s case. He had it with him when he entered Lotus House. It’s not on the cart. Where is it?”
In the mad rush of disposing of Bowser’s body (it was still damned difficult to think of him as Latham), I’d forgotten the existence of his black bag.
“It’s upstairs,” I said.
“Fetch it, then, and I’ll be on my way.”
That was the first pleasing news I’d had in the last eighteen hours. We trundled up to Arabella’s room, the stranger staying close by my elbow, presumably so I couldn’t snatch away the case from under his nose. The room was undisturbed, Bowser’s black gown and enormous unmentionables strewn about the floor. The man threaded his walking stick through the leg hole of the petticoat, lifted it from the floor and regarded it musingly. “Poor old Archie,” he said. “Who’d have guessed?”
“We all have a secret,” I said. “What’s yours?”
He gave me an arrogant smirk. “I never share confidences, India. It’s a sign of weakness. Now let’s have the case and I’ll be gone.”
I’d have gladly done that, if only to get the smarmy bastard out of my establishment. Only one thing prevented me from doing so: the case was gone. I crawled under the bed, opened the closet, pawed through the bedclothes, searched behind the curtains and under the cushions in the chair, rummaged through the dresser drawers and the oak wardrobe, my heart sinking as I realized the magnitude of what was missing. My visitor declined to join the search, just stood aside and watched me flail around the room while his brows knitted and his face grew black as thunder. Finally, I could no longer avoid the obvious.
“It isn’t here.”
“Then where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
His walking stick beat an impatient tattoo on the floor. “Was there anyone with Latham when he died?”
“One of the bints. Arabella Cloud, she calls herself.”
He seized my arm in a talon-like grasp. “It’s imperative that I have that case. Find the girl and ask her where it is.”
I gulped. In my swift search, I’d noticed that Bowser’s case was not the only thing missing from Arabella’s room; her portmanteau, a warped and spotted case of ancient vintage, had disappeared from her wardrobe, as had all of her gowns and stockings. Hope springing eternal (and to get out from under that basilisk glare my visitor was leveling at me), I dashed up to the third floor, to find the room I’d assigned to Arabella cold and quiet. The bed bore a faint impression of someone’s body, but that was the only sign the girl had ever been in the room. My visitor was at the window when I returned to the bedroom, his lips drawn tight in anger, and his eyes the colour of a sabre blade, which did not augur well for me. He listened to my report with a skeptical air.
“Search the house,” he said. “But quietly. The last thing either of us needs at the moment is an uproar.”
So I crept in and out of bedrooms, tiptoeing cautiously around sleeping whores and freezing at every wheeze, sigh and snore. A quick reconnaissance of the rest of Lotus House confirmed my fears. Arabella had decamped. Likely, she was already down the street at Mother Fletcher’s, testing the mattresses and spreading rumours. Eventually, I had to report that neither Arabella nor Bowser’s case was anywhere inside Lotus House. This was not welcome news to the stranger with the silver-knobbed walking stick. He uttered an oath that made the curtains flutter, but his face was impassive.
“Does the girl have friends?”
“Not here. Arabella kept herself to herself.”
“Family?”
“No doubt she has one, but I don’t know anything about them.”
“The girl worked for you and you know nothing about her?” The stranger’s tone was faintly incredulous.
“We weren’t at Christchurch together, no. She probably sold violets at Piccadilly Circus or ran a loom in the cotton mills or worked below stairs at a country house until the squire’s son impregnated her and the housekeeper sent her away. That’s all I know about any of the girls here.” My brittle tone had no effect on the stranger; he just looked faintly bemused that I hadn’t had Arabella fill out a ten-page application before buying her a couple of gowns and assigning her to a mattress.
“Describe her,” he said.
“Dark brown hair,” I recited. “Brown eyes, high cheekbones, pale skin.”
The stranger raised an eyebrow, as if to say, “That’s all?”
“A tiny waist. Big breasts and an arse the size of Lancashire.” She was a whore. What else was there to notice about her?
“Is there nothing more you can tell me? No distinguishing marks? A mole, perhaps, or a scar? Did she have an accent?”
“We all have accents here,” I said waspishly. “Depending on what the gentlemen want that day. Sometimes Arabella was Hungarian, sometimes from the East End, and sometimes she was the heir to the British throne.”
My visitor frowned.
“Look, I just hired her to work here, not pose for a study of the ‘Modern English Tart.’ I didn’t commit every freckle and beauty mark to memory. I’ve described her as well as I can to you.”
There was nothing more I could tell him.
“Perhaps you could leave me your address. If the case turns up, I’ll forward it to you.” It seemed the only logical thing to say, under the circumstances, and I was hoping he’d take the hint and vacate the premises.
“You needn’t trouble yourself, India. That case is miles away by now.”
“Well,” I said airily, “if you know where it is, you can collect it easily enough.”
He gave me a mirthless smile. “Perhaps. In any case, I needn’t trouble you any longer. I think it would be to our mutual advantage to keep what happened here tonight to ourselves.”
His admonition was hardly necessary; I’d no intention of ever uttering the word “Bowser” again.
He took his leave of me then, gliding out the door and down the steps of Lotus House as coolly as if he were strolling through Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon and hadn’t spent the night in a brothel disposing of a dead body. The mist had stopped and the fog was burning off slowly as he disappeared down the sidewalk, and I have to say I was damned glad to see the back of him.
 
 
 
I spent the rest of the day in my room with the blinds drawn and a sleeping mask over my eyes. My midnight rambles through the city had been tiring, but the few hours spent in the company of that dark, calculating man had exhausted me thoroughly. I slept like the dead through the afternoon and into the early evening. Around six, Mrs. Drinkwater rapped abruptly on my door and careened into the room like a schooner blown off course. Through sheer luck she found the dressing table, and left me a pot of tea and a plate of beef sandwiches, which I fell on and devoured like a ravening wolf.
After a hot bath, I was feeling myself again, so I descended the stairs and mingled a moment in the dining room with the girls, who were just finishing their egg and chips and getting ready for a night’s work. I adjudicated a dispute between Marigold and Lucinda over whose turn it was to wear the purple taffeta, listened to a complaint about the quality of wrist restraints I’d purchased for a discount from a brothel going out of business in the next street and gave my ear to a shockingly bold request that I supply the rouge for the house, as I could no doubt get it wholesale and save the girls a bundle. Next, they’ll be unionizing. Soon I’d have to negotiate labour contracts with the Association of Risque Trade Suppliers. It was growing increasingly difficult for an employer to exploit the workers in this country. I’d have to write my MP soon.
Still ruminating over the difficulties of running a going concern in an era of labour unrest and rising costs, I retired to my office for a stiff whisky and a glance at the evening papers, which promptly made me forget the vicissitudes of business ownership. They were full of breathless headlines about the discovery of the body of Sir Archibald Latham, Member of the British Empire and Clerk to Lord Folkstone of the War Office. I read the stories with interest (naturally) and learned that Constable Thomas Peters (only three months on the force, poor lad) had been patrolling the streets of his district at eight o’clock when he was drawn to investigate the rear yard of an abandoned warehouse at the jute docks. “Something seemed amiss,” he told the reporter (a mastery of understatement, if I’ve ever heard one). “And so I went round the back to see if anything was wrong.”
To the young constable’s dismay, he found the body of one middle-aged man, well dressed, the pockets of his black broadcloth suit turned out and empty, and bearing just the faintest impression of rouge on his veined cheeks. In a fever of excitement (his first dead body!), the bobby had blown his whistle, bringing his counterpart from the next district, and in a twinkling, the full force of the local constabulary had been brought to bear on the crime scene, Scotland Yard had been notified, and Inspector Miles Havelock of the Criminal Investigation Division was on the scene. In no time at all, the victim was identified, the widow notified (she was now in seclusion; requests for a few words were sternly declined by the family solicitor), and Inspector Havelock had assured the public that the killer would be found.
There were related articles extolling the virtue of Bowser—his first at Oxford, his prowess at rugby and cricket, his service to Queen and country—all the usual twaddle when respectable public Tories die. Just once, I’d like to read the real obituary: “Bloody fool, drunkard, poltroon and lout. Enjoyed buggering stable boys. Voted Liberal more than once.” Now that would be worth reading.
The papers also contained the usual laments over the escalating crime rate and the inability of the Metropolitan Police Force to keep reputable citizens from being thumped on the head, all tinged with a wistful nostalgia for a kinder, more innocent era, when virtue reigned and the streets were safe. Wherever the writers of this kind of drivel had lived before now, it clearly wasn’t London.
There was one question the eagle-eyed reporters seemed not to have asked, and that was what precisely had compelled Constable Peters to amble behind an abandoned warehouse. His intuition aside, it seemed an odd thing to do, or perhaps it was just a happy coincidence (at least for Mrs. Latham, who needn’t worry any longer about when her husband would be home), but my money was on a dark stranger with a malacca walking stick, standing in the shadows and playing the role of deus ex machina
.
I hadn’t bothered to report the missing Arabella to the authorities. They’d have looked at me as though I should be occupying a bed in Bedlam. A prostitute who disappeared wasn’t cause for alarm; she’d have run off with a suitor or found another house to work in or been lured away by another madam who promised her a bigger share of the takings (in that case, good riddance to her). To be truthful, I didn’t want the police making any inquiries about Arabella, anyway. An investigation might turn up the interesting fact that she’d gone missing the very day that Sir Archibald Latham had been found dead by a clairvoyant peeler. I thought it likely that Arabella didn’t want to take any chances of being connected to a customer’s death, even if it had been an innocent one, and of course, it didn’t look all that innocent since I’d seen fit to move the corpse somewhere else. Arabella probably had some secret in her past (don’t we all?) and had reasons of her own for packing up and moving on. I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over her, nor Bowser for that matter, but when I went to bed that night, I slept fitfully, dreaming of a haughty smile and grey eyes.
FOUR
T
uesday dawned, another chilly, cloud-shrouded day with a light drizzle that left a glaze on the pavement. The factories were working at full throttle, and the smoke from the tanneries and mills and rendering plants mingled with the vapors rising from the Thames and the soot from thousands of chimneys, creating a poisonous yellow haze that hung in the air like a veil. People scuttled past on the sidewalk, mufflers and scarves wrapped over their noses and mouths, blinking their eyes against the sulfurous murk.
The morning papers were still running hysterical columns on the dangerous London streets, and Mrs. Latham was still declining comment, but some of Bowser’s co-workers had been interviewed, and all attested to their colleague’s attention to detail, exemplary work habits and astute sense of judgment. One bloke weighed in with a sugary paean to Bowser’s loyalty to the Royal Family and his “great regard” for the Prince of Wales, which brought a smile to my lips.
The day passed quietly enough. Lucinda’s cousin Molly had arrived on the doorstep, fresh off the farm and ready for a life of glamour in the metropolis. I was grateful to have her, for Arabella’s departure had caught me short, and there were clients to be serviced who were chomping at the bit for a fling with a real Slavic princess. Molly’s eastern European accents were weak, but since her natural speech was a thick Yorkshire dialect that was nearly incomprehensible even to English speakers, I thought she might do. “Just keep the conversation to a minimum,” I advised, “and if anyone questions whether you’re really a Bulgarian countess, open your dress and show ’em your tits.” In my business, that’s sound advice in any number of circumstances. In any case, if she failed to convince the gents that she was genuine royalty from east of the Danube, she would still appeal to the tally-ho crowd, who would feel right at home saddling up a strapping maid who still had straw in her hair.
The hours passed quickly while Lucinda and I did our best to coax Molly into some semblance of alluring eroticism, not an easy task with a milk maid with chilblains and a distressing tendency to giggle at the thought of the male anatomy. By the end of the day, she was no longer spitting in the fireplace or erupting into laughter every time Lucinda (playing the role of client) whispered risqué suggestions into her ear.
BOOK: India Black
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