Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (44 page)

“Look,” said Wardle. “Coxhill’s bending my ear with some scare story Hunt’s been feeding him. Run up to the gallery and keep him quiet, will you? I don’t want any surprises.”

He stepped back into the party. I turned to Miss Villiers, my head bowed.

She laid a hand on my forearm. “Don’t worry. I have to be leaving anyway.”

“I’m sorry,” I began.

“Think nothing of it,” she shook her head. She handed me a scrap of paper. “Come to visit the invalid, will you? And to fill me in, if you dare, on what’s happened.”

I nodded, too upset to think what she meant. I watched her walk away with that measured step of hers. Wrenching myself away, I hurried away towards the gallery staircase, checking in with the constables on duty as I went. There was a sense of holding one’s breath, waiting for the exhibit to close so we could breathe a sigh of relief, exhausted but proud.

Pausing at the bottom of the stairs to gather my thoughts, I pocketed Miss Villiers’ address and pulled out the spidery envelope the young constable had just handed me, a messy scrawl in a barely literate hand. I ripped it open:

SUMFINK

TO SHEW YOUS

SEE U AT OUR STAND

CLOZING TIME

The signature, in childish print, was Wm Hunt.

The doors were closing to the public at that moment. Hunt would already be there. What a day. Was Miss Villiers playing games with me? Or had she truly not received all those notes of mine? The Worms’ delivery service might be less trustworthy than I had realised. Still, here was a chance to put some pressure on Hunt. Coxhill had the smooth talk, and I might never tie him down to any admission. But Hunt, with his foolish belligerence, was more volatile. If I hinted that I knew his dark secret, mightn’t he crack? I could say that I knew about the fraud; that I suspected him of killing Shuffler. There would be no way to prove it after so long, not without witnesses. But Hunt was the sort of fool who might blurt out an indiscretion.

I headed up the stairs.

“Sergeant?” A small ferret-like man appeared behind me. “What a pleasure.”

“Scholes,” I groaned. “Are you not sufficiently occupied rubbishing the underground railways?”

He grinned as if I had complimented him. “We’re changing track on that one, as it were. Great Western’s done a deal with the Metropolitan, supplying locomotives in return for a share of the business. Access to the city from Paddington, you see.”

“And how does that change your opinion?”

He laughed. “I’ve no opinions, my friend, beyond the GWR’s holding in the
Bugle
.”

I shook my head. “How do you live with yourselves?”

He chuckled again. “I could ask you lot the same question.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He tapped the side of his nose and pointed towards the engineering section. He too was clutching a note in his hand. “Heading this way, are you? I have an urge to view a few last things.”

“Hadn’t you better be leaving?”

“I’m invited to the cocktails. Why, aren’t you?”

I turned away.

Coxhill was heading towards us at full steam. “Cameron, old man.”

“Speak of the proverbial,” murmured Scholes. “I’m off.”

Coxhill pushed impetuously past the newsman. “Glad to see you. What the devil is going on?”

I was disappointed. With Coxhill around, I would get nothing indiscreet from Hunt. “I could ask you the same question. I just got a note from Hunt–”

“Me too. Damned strange. Fellow can hardly write a line.”

Scholes was still skulking nearby, so I guided Coxhill towards the gallery. “Hunt wrote you a note as well?”

“Delivered to the door,” he said, looking anxiously about him. “Not like him. Straight as an arrow, all things being equal.”

“Has he been behaving oddly?”

“We’ve all been under a spot of pressure.”

“Anything particular, Mr Coxhill?”

He put his fingers to the bridge of his nose as if in pain. “What an effort it’s been,” he sighed. “A success, of course. A tremendous success. But these problems with the Metropolitan. Bloody Fleet sewer bursting in. Dreadful business. We need a boost. Is young Bertie back yet? I’m so hoping to hold a little bash for his birthday. Keep in the royal good books, what.”

“I see,” I nodded. I had never seen him so out of sorts. Mr Wetherell must have it right, Coxhill’s schemes were coming unravelled and he was just opening his eyes in time to see it.

He fretted silently as we rounded the stuffed animal exhibits. November already, I thought, the first today. Golden lamplight was beginning to spill across the gallery. The cupolas normally needed only natural light, but with the drawing in of autumn they had taken to lighting the chandeliers for late viewing. Down below us, the murmur of the party spilled out into the great hall. I spotted Wardle looking up at me, hands thrust in coat pockets. I gave him a workmanlike nod.

“No sign of the blighter?” Coxhill harrumphed. “I couldn’t see the chaise outside.”

His nerves were beginning to affect me. I glanced rapidly across the HECC display case. Steel pipes and intricate diagrams, in front of a great map of London.

“Everything looks in order,” I assured him.

“I’m not sure,” said Coxhill, biting at his nails. “Some of the fixtures are missing.”

As the lamplight grew stronger, we heard a groan behind us.

“Jesus God,” said Scholes in a rasping whisper.

Poor Coxhill saw it before me. He shrieked like a distraught girl. All conversation below was silenced for a moment. Then there was hubbub, footsteps on the stairs, shouts of anger and distress.

I ran to the case where Scholes stood struck dumb. There, instead of the stuffed Alaskan bears, stood two figures in a horrible parody of action. In place of the zoological label was a scrawled replacement: “commerce conquers idleness”. One figure crouched, with hands aloft, as if in his death throes, but his face turned towards us. I recognised Smiler from our sewer encounter.

Above him loomed another man, holding a rifle, his face so dreadfully burnt that the features were unrecognisable. His clothes were familiar, his stature lean, but it was the hat perched on his head that I recognised from the little daguerreotype that Madame Skelton had so proudly shown me. There could be no doubt in my mind about that bowler hat. It was Berwick Skelton.

THE VENGEANCE

“Are you sure it’s Skelton?” said Wardle impatiently. We were in the hospital morgue, waiting on Simpson’s arrival.

“I never met him, sir. I can’t be quite certain.” I looked at the body, remembering that night at Euston three years previously. Was this really the man I had been seeking for so long? The body seemed so small: somehow less than human. It struck me that in my heart of hearts I had wanted his plot to come to fruition, whatever it was. That somehow I had more faith in him than in Wardle, and I was saddened to see the renegade hero laid low. “But I recognise these clothes, from a photo his mother showed me.” I shook myself, and set about checking the pockets, trying to master the strange sense of wonder I felt. I suppose part of me was hankering for answers, hoping that the
magnum opus
Miss Villiers had imagined might be hidden about his person. There was only a scrap of paper.

“His mother?” said Wardle. “Enough of your Celtic intuitions. He could be any old fool in a bowler hat. Bring the mother in to identify him.”

“I can try, sir.” If I told her, she might give me that old leather-bound book. Yet I couldn’t bear the thought of Wardle haranguing her. “But her home’s been knocked down. Who knows where she’s gone? Even if I find her, she’s old and frail. She wouldn’t know her own reflection.” I narrowed my eyes. “How about Nellie?”

He ignored me. “The stepbrother, then.”

“You couldn’t take his word for it.”

Wardle stared at the burnt face. It was as if Skelton had held such a spell over us that we had barely been able to think about him, until this. Now he lay there dead in front of us, as if he had fallen from another realm, a magical place. The spell was broken, and we couldn’t look away.

“I want no doubts,” Wardle growled to himself. “I’m tired of these games.”

“This other man, it was him in the sewer. He’s the brother of the old corpse from the spout.”

“How do you know this?”

“The Reform League. They also told me he worked with Skelton. I’d even met him, in a Clerkenwell public house.”

“When you were sniffing around?”

“That’s right.” I thought of Madame Skelton, of Numpty, of Shuffler, and all the convolutions of those last months. I would have to choose my words carefully. I had promised Worm I would tell nobody what he had said of Shuffler and Hunt.

Wardle nodded. “Skelton’s accomplice, eh?”

“The first old tramp, maybe he tried to get something out of them. A few pennies’ compensation. But these two will have wanted more.”

“Revenge.”

“Smiler for his brother. Skelton for… I don’t know. For everything.” I turned over the scrap of paper in my hand. There was a series of symbols in Skelton’s inimitable code. Yes, it was him, all right.

“What is it?” said Wardle.

“Just scribbles,” I shrugged and held it up for him to see.

He looked at me closely for a moment, then nodded, as if content I was keeping nothing from him.

“Sir, you’ve known where Nellie was all along, haven’t you?”

“I have kept things from you, Watchman.” He turned back to the bodies. “But I promise you, only things as it seemed dangerous to tell.”

“I don’t doubt you, sir. But if you want a proper identification, it has to be her.”

“She’s gone.”

“She hasn’t. That’s why I was late. She says to tell you, it’s not enough. She wants to go to a Swiss finishing school.”

“Does she now? I’ll send her to a Swiss bloody bedlam.”

An assistant bustled in. Dr Simpson would be along in a moment, and he had to prepare the bodies for examination, which entailed stripping them. We withdrew to the outer room.

“Is there no end to it, Watchman?” he sighed. “I need some rest before tomorrow’s party. We’ll take no chances. Get through tomorrow safe and sound and that’ll be an end to it.”

“Yes, sir.” I was just tired, but he seemed to take this as a reproach.

“Look, Watchman. I own I made a mess of it. It’s not the first mess of my career. I only hope to God it’s the last. It’s only in those novels of yours you’ll find policemen above making mistakes.” He closed his eyes for a moment, pressing his fingers to his brow. “Still, there’s only a few dead from it. We can be proud of ourselves for that at least. Tomorrow, I’ll go to the Palace. You speak to Coxhill. He’s played a canny game. Bang some sense out of him. I’ll wager that Skelton took it into his head to derail Coxhill’s operation. He and his friend must have chosen tonight as the perfect moment to humiliate him. They’ve cooked up some little stunt, Hunt’s got wind of it, and lost his rag.”

“Can’t we put out an alert to catch Hunt?”

He curled up the edge of his mouth. “A man like that, he won’t get himself caught. Even an animal like him knows when he’s gone too far. We’ll send word to the ports, but he’ll lie low a long time. And to be frank, when rough justice has been served, why trouble yourself?”

I looked at Wardle and saw in his eyes something I would never have expected, the light of a fanatic. The world had come to revolve around his precious royal family. Perhaps it was from motives of personal gain, but I think more from blind prejudice, or perhaps just habit and fatigue, from all those years in their service. They were all that mattered and, in his eyes, the two people lying dead in the next room had no rights at all.

He picked up the bowler hat. “That display he left, it’s a message, see. A warning. You know the Cockney slang for hat? Titfer. A tit-for-tat. To tell us it’s due revenge, see, for Skelton messing them around. You have to understand the criminal mind, Watchman.”

“Gentlemen.” Simpson rolled in, looking pleased with himself. “An unexpected pleasure. Sergeant, I had a further inkling on those bones of yours. I date them to 1846.”

Wardle glared at him. “How so sure of a sudden? Insufficient evidence, you said.”

Simpson handed me a newspaper clipping from his pocket. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said and proceeded into the inner room.

The piece spoke of bones found along the railway diggings. In the days before they flushed the sewers, the Fleet ditch was full of fetid gas. Explosions were commonplace. A whole Poor House had gone up in smoke in 1846. I blinked at the date: that must have been when Berwick’s father died. He made himself ill building a tunnel that was barely used, fell into ignominy and debt, and died in a filthy explosion; then they go and dig him up for another stinking tunnel. Just like laying Shuffler’s body at the door of the HECC, Berwick left bones in the houses Smiler and Co. were robbing as an accusation.

We heard a cry of surprise from the next room. We hurried in.

Simpson looked up from the bodies, surprised at our intrusion. “Allow me to explain my surprise, gentlemen. This fellow…” He pointed at Smiler, now doubly disturbing, being still in that crouching pose. “…died some days ago. Rather like that old tramp, you remember. Bruising and head injuries.”