Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (34 page)

“We decided early on, Sergeant,” Bazalgette said, “that a sewer through which a man cannot walk is a sewer not worth building.”

“Like underground roads, then,” I nodded. “Is that not an invitation to loafers and footpads?”

“No right being down here, if they’re not working for me. Ah, here is the first feeder junction. Good, good.”

Only minutes into our walk, liquids were emerging from a grate in the tunnel wall. I avoided the questionable stream by walking with legs akimbo, but I was glad of the protective clothing, recalling Simpson’s stern injunctions.

Bazalgette explained his system succinctly, but with undisguised enthusiasm. After years of debate at the Sewer Commission, with depositions from engineers and academics the length and breadth of the country, he was constructing five intercepting sewers of this size to divert the whole of London’s wastes away from the river, by gravity where possible, pumping where necessary. They incorporated existing functional sewers as feeder ducts. Where they were obliged to, they rebuilt to allow a fully grown man easy access. “The cost of maintaining smaller drains,” he explained, “is a menace, not to mention the danger.”

Bazalgette interspersed this discourse with suggestions barked at Fleming and orders to the workmen. He wanted grates angled, flaws in the mortar fixed, manholes at curves in the tunnel.

“It was written in papyrus. The Romans discovered it by chance. The stormwater drain for the forum turned out to be quite the most effective sewerage system ever. The
Cloaca Maxima
. Gravity carries away solids suspended in water along the bottom. Natural floods serve not to overwhelm the system but to cleanse it. Now, Sergeant,” he said, turning to me with impatient eyes in the dim light, “what is your business here?”

“My fear is this,” I said. “Could you enter houses from here? Remove property?”

“Tell me, Sergeant,” he chuckled, “you must enjoy those sensational French novels. Vagabonds and political undesirables hiding out in Parisian catacombs.”

“Sometimes, sir, I feel I am in one of those novels. I have puzzled and puzzled at a series of impossible thefts, thefts where no entry has been forced.”

“That skeleton lark?” he said thoughtfully. “Done and dusted, ain’t it?”

A scrabbling sound announced the appearance of a small child, jumping nimbly from an opening high up in the wall ahead. He tipped his hat to us, clearly unaware that Bazalgette was his employer, and reported to Fleming. “Good and shipshape, guv. The odd gap in the upper brickwork, but nothing like that previous. I’d call it sound.”

The foreman slapped the boy encouragingly on the shoulder and led him back a few yards. There was something touching in their workmanlike exchange, the little urchin and the great grey brute. Fleming lifted him in his great hands and practically threw him up to another opening. The wee fellow scrambled through with a will and vanished like a mouse into its hole.

I turned back to the engineer. “Sir, I must compare the locations of these thefts with the progress of your sewers.”

He nodded thoughtfully and pointed ahead. “Can you accompany me as far as Millbank? There you will see that a fully functioning sewer cannot be easily navigated. Access to houses is a different matter. The connecting sewers are a motley affair. Some you could walk through, but only the smallest of toshers could wriggle up through the older ones. Only those little fellows know what is accessible and what is not. A thief blundering in would be unlikely to get out with anything intact.”

Only the little fellows know. I could see it in my mind’s eye, a curious tosher; something shiny in a cellar; things for the taking. Why not look around, up the steps, try the cellar door? I looked up at the hole where the urchin had vanished. “Toshers, you say?”

In the dim light, it was hard to read Bazalgette’s expression, but he took Fleming’s lamp, declaring suddenly, “Fine work, foreman. That will be all. We continue alone. You called your visit semi-official, Sergeant? Only I hesitate to cast suspicion on innocents. Unless you will give me your word that you will consider the facts in the broadest possible light, I can make no deposition.”

I looked at him. There was something about the man I found intensely impressive. Noble, even. Besides, I simply wanted a solution. “You have my word on that, sir. We have punished scapegoats enough. I only wish to curtail the crimes.”

“Well, then,” he sighed. Bazalgette lowered his tone as we strode on and quickened his pace somewhat. “I see your concern, Sergeant. Come to my office and I’ll share a few things with you, in the light of which I hope you may take a reasonable view, should these little fellows prove to be involved in your thefts. Mischievous scoundrels, some of them, it’s true.” He peered into the distance. “But they’re damned good workers, I tell you.”

He began by telling me the story of the Sewer Commission.

“It’s hard to remember what it was like back in ’48. Revolutions across the continent. Five million signatures on the Chartist petition. Hundreds of thousands marching through the streets, smashing lamps at the Palace and chanting “
Vive la République”
. They evacuated Victoria to the Isle of Wight, you know. Bloody awful state the country was in. Somebody had to sort it out. They passed Reform Acts, poor statutes and colliery laws and still twenty thousand a year were dying of cholera. We call ourselves civilised, yet we spend our summers bored in Brighton, while the other half are dying in ditches. It’s a scandal, of course, but people don’t want to know.” He pulled his deerstalker on more firmly as the smell and darkness intensified. “In ’48 the Commission flushed the sewers. A mistake, the cholera turned epidemic. They decided to survey the whole shambles. Only chaps kept dying in mysterious ways. I had one man suffocated, two blown to bits and more wasted away with the ague. So when I discovered a veritable army who knew the old system like the back of their hand, I took them on like a shot. Pig-headed not to.”

“Do you employ these tosher children?”

“I certainly do. A pittance we pay them, but they think it a handsome wage. The taxpayer gets good value out of them. A job I had convincing the damned politicians. Had to do a little persuading work. You recall the Great Stink?”

“I’ve heard tell of it.”

“The Thames was backed up something rotten. The city was a graveyard. But, of course, the ruling classes simply fled the city. So my little toshers orchestrated a special concoction of aromas outside Parliament.” He chuckled. “They had to soak the curtains in chloride of lime. What I’d failed to achieve in ten years of meetings, they did in sixteen days. Disraeli ran from the chamber and they gave us the money. Ah, look here.”

The filth beneath our feet began to swell as we approached a massive metal grate across the whole tunnel. The sewer beyond it was in full working use, deep sludge flowing away from us, fed by innumerable adjoining passages. Foul and stinking, but navigable in waders. Could you remove a Tom Thumb chair thus, without ruining it, without being afraid you would drown?

Bazalgette led me up metal rungs set in the sewer wall and pushed open a manhole. We emerged into broad daylight on the embankment, near Westminster, and headed for a makeshift cabin.

“Here already, sir?” said a small round man brightly, leaping up from his deskwork to fill a porcelain basin and put the kettle on the hob. Bazalgette wasted no time in throwing off his accoutrements and scrubbing his face and hands with carbolic soap. The small man turned to me and introduced himself as Jebb. “Glass of water, officer? And warm yourself up, now, you look proper chilled. What do you make of our catacombs?”

“Extraordinary,” I said, moving over to the stove. “I can’t believe the extent of it all.”

“Oh, the London sewers were long enough to reach to Constantinople even before we started,” said Jebb. “Thousands of millions of gallons of filth flowing into the Thames.”

I put down my glass. Above the stove hung a display cabinet, contents neatly labelled: Roman coins, pots and whale bones.

“Office is full of bones some days,” remarked Jebb. “Wherever you dig, you unearth the past. Found a whole Roman bath under Parliament Square, water still in it.”

I frowned. “And what do you do with it all?”

“Depends. Human remains we take off to the charnel house–”

“Thank you, Jebb,” said Bazalgette briskly. “Fetch me the map, will you? And off to lunch with you.”

Jebb deferentially vanished and Bazalgette unrolled before me a map of London thrice the size of mine. His great sewers were traced in different colours, continuous from the east into town but dotted as they headed on to the south, west and north.

He placed on top of the map a series of apocalyptic engravings: Daniel and the lion; Noah’s Flood; the Tower of Babel. “This Royal Academy fellow, John Martin,” he said, “has a penchant for mythological images.” He placed a further sheet on top. “Looks like something from Dante’s
Inferno
, eh? Sinners drowning in trenches of excrement. But it’s a vision of London, you see. Martin’s plan for trenches through the heart of the city, intercepting the old sewers perpendicular to the river, drawing the capital’s filth out eastward. But you have to dig the trench before you let the sewage in.” He pointed to a demoniacal figure releasing a sluice gate into an empty channel. “That’s the moment for your thieves, before the sewer’s fully operational. Like the stretch you saw today.”

He removed the prints and I looked again at the map. The five snaky lines, traversing the metropolis, were labelled with opening dates. I ran through my mental list of thefts from Pearson’s onward. Each one tallied with one of Bazalgette’s lines.

Seeing my expression, he sat down heavily. “Cunning little schemers. This is deuced unfortunate. Sergeant, how can I impress it upon you? These boys have saved us innumerable injuries, deaths even. They are curing the city of its most deadly ills. They deserve the bloody George Cross, not prison.” He clenched his fist in frustration. “And I need them. I am trying to make London the greatest city on this earth, and I need their help.”

I nodded. Something was pulling at the back of my mind. “Mr Bazalgette, tell me. How on earth did you come to engage this group of vagabonds?”

He looked up. “Chap called Skelton.” The kettle whistled to celebrate my utter confusion. Berwick seemed to be everywhere I had been and everywhere I would go. “Are you quite all right? Have a cup of tea, old fellow.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said as if in a dream, “but this Skelton. How did you meet him?”

He looked a little surprised by my interest. “At a Sewer Commission hearing. If I remember, he was pleased by my notion that we have a duty to sanitise the whole city, including the poorer regions. He impressed upon me the added duty of rehousing those dispossessed by the work, a measure for which I have convinced Parliament to pay.”

“Good of you.”

“There’s enough ways we steal from the poor,” he said impassively. “Sharp fellow, though. Surprising knowledge of hydraulics.”

I nodded breathlessly. “I believe his father worked with Brunel.”

“For Brunel, you say?”

“As an engineer, I thought.”

He frowned. “If you say so, old man. I was under the impression he came from labouring folk. Did rather well for himself, I thought.”

I thought of old Madame Skelton in her great brass bed. Could it be that she had deluded herself about the grandeur of their origins?

“Still, I have a high opinion of the chap. Saved us a deuce of work with these tosher fellows. They were reluctant at first. Congenitally shy of all things legal. I had my own qualms: child labour, grim conditions. But I’m convinced it’s for the best. At their old game, the poor souls would have ended up dead or in prison. This way, we benefit from their estimable knowledge and dependable advice. They get bathing facilities, money in their pocket and tremendous pride in work that will safeguard the capital for the future.”

“Skelton organised all this?”

“The teams have their own little leaders, all answerable to the Tosher King.” He gave me a little smile as he pronounced these words.

“The Tosher King?”

“There was an old duffer, a bit harum-scarum, who passed away. His brother runs it now.”

“The old boy,” I asked, short of breath, “did he have a club foot?”

“That’s the chap. Know him, did you?”

“Not exactly. And the brother?”

“Goes by the name of Smiler. More efficiency about it, though I’m concerned he skims the cream off the boys’ wages.”

“Where can I find them now?”

“All sorts of little hidey-holes they have. I offered to house them but they wouldn’t have it.”

“And Skelton is still involved?”

“No. Bigger fish to fry. Writing for magazines. Committees. Dynamo of energy.”

“Would any of your fellows still know him?”

Bazalgette took his tin cup and beckoned me outside. His secretary was skulking at the bold new wrought-iron railing, looking down at the Thames.

“Jebb,” said Bazalgette pleasantly. “Do you have an address for Skelton?”

“Don’t believe so, sir. But he pops through occasionally, checking on the boys. Sergeant, you haven’t any tea. Can I fetch you a cup?”