Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (6 page)

“What business is that of yours? Off to study medicine?”

“Just asking,” he shrugged. “No hoffence hintended, hofficer.”

“None taken, wee man.” A thought struck me. “You didn’t know him, did you? Club foot, name of Shuffler?”

“Merely hinterested, hofficer.”

“Hmm. You’d make a good detective, young Worm.”

“Give us a job, then.”

I laughed. “Put it this way, it wasn’t the spout that killed him.”

“That what the doc said?” He peered at me, eyes flashing with the same old light. “Full of bluff and flam, these apothecaries. A Scotchman at Scotland Yard, eh? Fit in nice, you will. Shift your crabshells now, or you’ll get an earful.”

The dullard at the front desk in Scotland Yard stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language. I repeated myself, as slowly as humanly possible.

“Wardle? He’s ahhht,” he shouted, and went back to his illustrated magazine. I stood my ground and light finally dawned. “Aoh, Wardle’s new man, is ya? It’s a theft, isn’t it?” He passed me a slip of paper marked with a Lambeth address. “You’ll want a cab. Nelson Square traffic’ll be somfink terrible this time of day.” He contemplated the fiendish puzzle. “Parliament Square worse, with the works on the clocktower. Ah!” he cried out, as if he had deciphered the Rosetta Stone. “Leg it to Charing Cross, grab a hansom on Waterloo Bridge, you’ll be there like the wind.”

Leaving the dullard and his wind behind, I walked up Whitehall as in a dream. My Superintendent had sent me off with his blessing, as if he was expecting the summons. Glossop was crestfallen that I had been requested ahead of him. Now this Yard subaltern had recognised me. Was I to be part of it all, at last?

I had been in London nine months without once crossing the river. From the hansom, I saw a London quite new to me. Fine buildings gleamed as far as the eye could see along the riverbanks; below them, ramshackle slums tumbled down to the turgid sludge.

As we crossed the bridge, the stench was shocking. For a moment, I thought our horses had defecated, but it was worse than that. This was the notorious Stink. In the pale summer sun the water was filthy brown. Far below us, ill-clad children splashed in the shallow water: Josiah’s mudlarks, like little magpies in search of treasure. I could not help but imagine legions more, all struggling to get to the surface, suffocating in those treacherous shallows.

Lambeth too was like an open sewer. We travelled slowly, crossing and recrossing roadworks, where teams of navvies seemed to be digging down to hell itself. I paid the fare grudgingly, fearing that Wardle would have long quit the scene of the crime.

Inside the house of Charles Pearson, MP for Lambeth and solicitor for the Corporation of London, all was calm and peace. The portly housekeeper showed me into the drawing room, where a scene of quintessential English hospitality met my eyes.

“Watchman,” said Wardle absently. “About time.” He sat hunched over in his overcoat, stranded in the middle of a chaise longue, clutching a cup of tea in both hands. It seemed the wrong moment to correct his misunderstanding of my name. “Go on, Mr Pearson.”

The honourable gentleman turned back to his wife. “It’s hardly life and death, dearest, and I have pressing business with the Metropolitan.”

“Charles, we have been burgled,” she said. “Most peculiarly burgled.”

“My dearest, nothing has been taken. The servants would have noticed.”

“But, Charles,” said Mrs Pearson in exasperation, “one of the servants may be the culprit.” She looked at Wardle tellingly.

“Well,” Pearson wafted a hand in the air, “they’re servants, dearest. They have a right to steal from us.”

“Do be serious, Charles.”

“Better they steal from us who trust them than cause bother stealing from others.”

“Really, Charles, one can be too flippant.” She sighed, but she clearly shared his affectionate indulgence for their servants. “We ought to call upon the City Police Force.”

“Inspector,” said Pearson, “should we call the City Police?”

Wardle grimaced, as if woken from a reverie. “With respect, sir, you might as well call upon the royal menagerie’s parrots.”

I watched in a state of awe. Wardle smoothed out none of the northern roughness from his voice for these people, and yet he seemed to speak their language. He was anatomising the couple’s exchange, I was sure of it. He appeared impassive, but actually he was sifting it all for details overlooked, or suppressed.

“You see, dearest?” Pearson sprang to his feet and reached for his briefcase.

“One moment, sir.” Wardle held up a hand, half-rising.

“My house has been burgled, Inspector,” Pearson interrupted charmingly, “I own it, I lament it, I rue it. But nothing has been taken, nobody has been hurt, and so–”

“You are sure, sir, that absolutely nothing of import has been removed?”

“You have something in mind, Inspector?”

“Something less obvious.” Wardle affected a casual gesture. “Papers. Receipts.”

Pearson considered. “My business work I keep at the office. Parliamentary documents at the House. The Metropolitan’s are secure in this case.”

Wardle frowned. “The underground scheme? Is that proceeding, sir?”

“Proceeding apace, if I do say so myself.”

“After twenty years of bargaining and begging,” added his wife.

“We sank the first shaft in February,” said Pearson, eyes twinkling, “and already we have a mile of tunnel cut, and the New Road relaid on top of it – or the Euston Road or whatever they call it now.”

“So,” Wardle nodded, “the devil is to have his own railway.”

Pearson laughed. “They won’t call it the devil’s work when they get from the City to Paddington for tuppence. Picture a labourer who toils all day at the cattle market, say, then has to walk all the way home. It’s no wonder he beats his wife and terrorises his children. Don’t you think, once he travels in luxury, he may retain a little kindness to spread around the hearth?”

“Of course, dear,” said Mrs Pearson. She had heard all this before.

“There’s a moral side too. If they can afford bigger premises by living further out, then these operatives can have their bed in a different room from their children.” He coughed significantly. “I’m sorry to be beastly, dear, but these things must be spoken of.”

Wardle gave no sign of being moved. “You anticipate profits?”

“Profits? I anticipate mania. Buy property in the suburbs. Underground trains will redraw the map of London. Every city in the world will want them.”

“And you’ll be digging up our roads for the next fifty years?”

“On the contrary, Inspector, we will be open within the year. Unless we wait for the Prince Consort’s new Exhibition.”

Mrs Pearson turned in my direction. “I still say it’s a pity they didn’t choose the high-level train. Gleaming bridges arching over the city. Think of the dramatic views.”

“Through the smog, dearest.”

“At night, then.”

“Poor views, in the dark, dearest.”

“But honestly, Charles, under the ground! The odour from the horses!”

“They’re trains, dearest, not omnibuses.”

“Sulphurous fumes, then. We shall be smothered. Why not put the filthy things on the streets?”

“That will come, dearest,” said Pearson, struggling to maintain his good humour. “They’re laying rails on the streets next month, special omnibuses running in trammel lines. I’m pushing for one up the Kennington Road.” He coughed, suddenly gaunt, and leaned over to kiss his wife’s hair. “Really, I must fly. I am frightfully late already.”

“Trains under the ground,” she sighed as he left. “My mother told me I was marrying a dreamer. Whatever next? They’ll be sailing to the moon, given half a chance.”

Wardle set down his teacup and leant forward. “Mrs Pearson, we must establish exactly what has gone.”

The housekeeper was called. Between the hours of eleven and six, without sign of forced entry, several bits of furniture had been moved around. A miniature “Tom Thumb” chair and footstool were missing, and a few coins from the kitchen jar. The housekeeper hesitated.

“Spit it out, Mrs Laing,” said Mrs Pearson.

Mrs Laing took a deep breath. “Happen as we’s found, Old Joseph, that is, being who found it, wrapped up in canvas by the mantelpiece clock, as has stopped, mind, what Old Joseph found there, that he’s put in the larder, madam, which I say ain’t right–”

“Mrs Laing.”

“It’s a bone, madam!”

Wardle frowned.

“Mrs Laing,” said Mrs Pearson, “please keep to the subject. The mantelpiece clock is hardly the inspector’s domain, and, heaven forfend, a bone! Pray what do you mean?”

The housekeeper prayed indulgence that she meant what she said and she said what she meant.

Wardle narrowed his eyes. “Why do you say it’s not right, putting it in the larder?”

“I won’t make stock from it,” said the good woman. “I don’t know where it’s been.”

“What I meant was,” Wardle continued gently, “what kind of bone is it?”

“Oh, I see. It’d be a rib, sir. From a scrawny old pony, I’d say.” She thought a moment. “Or a big old dog.”

“I should like to see that bone, Mrs Laing.” Talking quietly, Wardle led the nervous servant out, and left me with the lady of the house.

“Officer,” said Mrs Pearson bright-eyed, “did none of us offer you tea!” She stood to pour me a cup, and I realised that, despite her elegant bearing, she was shaken. “Whatever do you make of it? You haven’t said a word.”

It was true. In my eagerness to appear attentive, I had been too nervous to speak. I had to cast around to come up with a theory. “A bone,” I said, feeling a fraud, “may be used to pacify a dog.”

“We have no dog. Nowhere to walk them, you see. Charles says that one day we will walk along the riverbanks for pleasure, the water clean as a mountain brook–”

“And all the traffic underground?” I said. For a moment I was anxious that my joke was inappropriate, but she smiled.

“No doubt. But until that day, no dogs for us.” She went over to the window. Her grey hair gave her a most distinguished look, when another woman might have made a show of dyeing it. “They say William Blake used to fish in the Westbourne, you know.”

“Did he really?”

A look of doubt crossed her face. “You know Blake?”

I smiled. “We weren’t personally acquainted, ma’am.”

She eyed me quizzically. Realising that I was joking, she seemed to relax. She gazed back out at the road covered with the dust of the digging works. “All these great works and schemes. Lambeth is getting its own bridge, you know. We shall become fashionable if we’re not careful.”

She appeared to me the height of fashion, but it seemed inappropriate to say so, even though we were indulging in small talk. It was a strange thing I had noticed on night duty, people seemed uncertain how to place me. Perhaps it was the combination of my accent with being a policeman, an equivocal profession that drew from the labouring types up to the beleaguered upper-middle classes. Uncertain of my provenance, people often gave me the benefit of the doubt and treated me almost like a gentleman. It would have annoyed my father no end, proud artisan and guildsman that he was.

I coughed. “The thief may have been unaware that you have no dogs.”

“Not if it were our own servant. The inspector suspects the servants.”

“Did he say so?”

“Not in so many words, but we are not in the habit of handing out keys willy-nilly.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Yes, but if nobody has broken in, then the servants…” She hesitated.

“You find it hard to credit?” I said quietly.

“One always hopes one’s servants are–” She narrowed her eyes. “Nonetheless, the inspector suspects, I’m sure of it.”

I hesitated to disagree with the second sharpest mind in England. Yet there seemed no harm in reassuring her. “Let us not leap to conclusions.”

Mrs Laing popped her head around the door. “Madame? The inspector asks permission to check the doors and windows.”

“Granted, of course.” Mrs Pearson and I exchanged a look. Wardle was one step ahead of us.

With the aid of the excellent Mrs Laing, we combed the house. I knew I should take notes, but in the rush to obey Worm’s summons I had of course forgotten my pencil. I asked to borrow one.

“Watch out, Mrs Laing,” said Wardle. “I’ve lost grand pianos that way.”

Mrs Laing thought this so hilarious that she broke out into giggles every few minutes. I marvelled at Wardle’s acuity, as the excellent woman, smiling now, spoke freely about all sorts of household matters. What with the roadworks, they were not in the habit of opening windows unnecessarily. The nursery, the bedrooms, and bathrooms were sound, and besides any commotion would have been heard. The kitchen and servants’ quarters held quieter spots, but the doors had been locked.

The servants greeted us with expressions of panic and fear. Wardle gave them no hint that they were under suspicion, instead evincing quiet interest in their work. One by one, they relaxed and spoke of familiar matters. I noted down the comings and goings of the household. Wardle kept silent as far as possible, watchful as a hawk.