Ring of Terror (4 page)

But not on one of the great public schools, thought Luke.

Recently the Rector had introduced him to the works of Charles Dickens and he was now halfway through
David Copperfield.
He remembered how Mr Mells had been despised by the boys at Mr Creakle’s academy and how he had finally lost his job when it was revealed, by the despicable Steerforth, that Mr Mells’ parents were living in an alms house. Small doubt that this would have been the reaction of public schoolboys like Oliver – there was a lot of Steerforth in Oliver, he thought – when it was leaked to them, as it surely would be, that his father was a gamekeeper.

The thought did not worry him.

He had no intention of becoming a school master.

Luke was squatting in a doorway in a narrow, unlighted and stinking alley in the east end of Whitechapel, watching a house which belonged to a widow called Triboff.

To arrive at that spot he had followed a young Russian, whom he had observed hanging round a coffee stall. His name was Tomacoff and he was known to be a messenger for members of the
émigré
ring. The fact that he was dawdling over his second cup of coffee, with occasional glances at his watch, suggested the possibility that the recipient of his message was not expected to be at home until a late hour. When he had delivered his message, he might be entrusted with a reply. If he could then be followed, he might lead to where another member of the ring was holed up.

Near midnight, with the streets silent and empty, it would not be easy to follow undetected, but it was worth trying. There was a light showing in an upstairs window. From time to time, the shadows of two men moved across it. All he had to do was to wait and make no movement that could be detected from the window.

To help you keep still, had his father not said many years ago, control your thoughts as well as your body. The events of the six years since he had been forced to abandon the road to the Church had certainly given him plenty to think about.

In many ways, the first year had been the hardest.

He had put in a full day at the spinning mills of the brothers Laurent, fetching and carrying for everybody and paid less than anyone. The weekday evenings had been spent in the house of Antoine de Maitre-Huquet, a distant relative of the Laurents newly arrived from France. Here he had consumed his first real meal of the day and for an hour or more the two young men had talked to each other, first in English, then in French, correcting each other’s grammar as they went. After which he had bicycled the six miles back to Bellingham. It was often after midnight before he reached his bed.

So for five days in the week. At the weekends, his father had expected him to help with the manifold jobs around Sir George’s preserves and coverts. Whilst so engaged, he had contrived to avoid meeting Sir George, or his sons. He was helped by the fact that Oliver was away for much of the time, either at school or, later, at Cambridge, while Julian was rarely at home, pursuing a course of political self-education in Germany and Spain.

After a year Antoine had decided that there was not much more he could teach Luke who was, by that time, a competent French conversationalist, with little grammar but an expanding vocabulary. So ended Act One. Act Two had been different and in some ways easier.

A Russian tutor had been located. This time it was not to be informal conversation, but steady professional coaching, which would have to be paid for. Luke had saved a certain amount from his Lavenham pay and his father had insisted, despite his protests, on supplying the deficiency out of his own pocket. Knowing what he did about his father’s finances, it had sometimes occurred to him to wonder where the money was coming from.

Living at home, with two or three hours of solid coaching every afternoon, he had made rapid progress. Commenting on this, his tutor had repeated what the Rector had observed, that his pupil seemed to have a natural aptitude for tuning in to the rhythm of a new language, something akin to an inborn talent for music. So rapid had been his progress that he was soon able to read and enjoy the books that he was given for homework. Sergei Aksakov’s
Chronicles of a Russian Family
and
The Childhood of Bagrov the Grandson,
plain fare, but nourishing; then to more exciting stuff. Ivan Goncharov’s
The Precipice
and Nikolay Gogol’s
Taras Bulba
with its account of the doings of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.

In the course of this study and particularly in Goncharov’s novel, which deals with the traumatic introduction of a nihilist into a conventional family of Russian gentry, he had found that he was imbibing something quite apart from the story. It was a matter of feeling.

From the French books, most of them nineteenth-century reminiscences of life in Paris, he had concluded that, in spite of their revolution, the French had, quickly and thankfully, reverted to a caste system. It was encapsulated, for his tutor Antoine, in the possession of the precious ‘de’. ‘You will perceive,’ he had said, ‘that although we have no aristocrats in France, we still value the concept of aristocracy.’ The Russians, on the other hand, did still have their Tsar, with his satellite court, supported by a landowning over-class. But, underneath it, he could feel the passions stirring; passions that had burst out, even as he was reading, in flame and blood on the decks of the battleship
Potemkin
and down the Odessa Steps. Flames ruthlessly extinguished, but burning all the hotter for being confined underground.

On one occasion towards the end of the second year, his father had brought back from shooting Dr Ramsden, the head of Lavenham Grammar School, a prestigious grant-aided establishment. Luke remembered him coming into the cottage, looking round cautiously as though suspecting owls in the rafters or rats under the floorboards. He had refused a chair, maybe fearing that if he sat down he would be committing himself too far and had listened, standing in front of the fire, to Hezekiah’s enthusiastic account of his son’s progress. After which he had offered them his advice.

Luke, he considered, ought to start at the foot of the ladder, seeking a post in some small church school. He should be able to secure such a position without great difficulty, particularly if backed by a recommendation from the vicar. What use fluent Russian would be to village children was not immediately apparent, but Luke, who was growing older and wiser, had confined himself to agreeing with every word that Dr Ramsden had uttered.

This was easy, since, as has been noted, he had no intention of becoming a school master.

His secret ambition had been planted, years earlier, by a bundle of dog-eared copies of the
Strand
magazine. Here he had stumbled into the colourful, the ensnaring world of Sherlock Holmes; of Baker Street, Dr Watson, hansom cabs and pea-soup fogs. His only objection to them was that the official police force seemed to be unduly depreciated. Inspector Hopkins was sometimes approved of. Lestrade, on the other hand, seemed to grab the wrong end of the stick with masterly regularity. It was all very well for Sherlock Holmes. The author dealt him all the cards. Luke thought that in a number of the cases he could have done as well as Holmes himself.

Was that someone looking out of the window? Surely the curtain had shifted. Or were his eyes beginning to play tricks? As the moments went by and a further quarter struck from a nearby clock he relaxed and resumed his thinking.

It was on his eighteenth birthday that he had finally revealed to his father what his plans were. His father had accepted this change of direction with unexpected composure. It was almost as though the thought of his son as a humble usher had ceased to appeal to him, too. A few mornings later, he had driven Luke in the trap to Ipswich and, after making sure that he had enough money for his immediate needs, had said goodbye to him, swung the trap round and clattered off without looking back.

Arrived in London, Luke had presented himself at the recruiting office of the Metropolitan Police. This had turned out to be a cold and dusty room in the corner of Scotland Place. Most of the other recruits seemed to be ex-soldiers, with the army polish still on them.

The intelligence test, so-called, had been a farce. The physical examination which followed had proved an ordeal. The recollection of being forced to strip naked and to submit to a police surgeon pawing his body, still had the power to upset him. The other recruits had taken it in their stride; no doubt their army experience had hardened them to indignities.

That same afternoon he had been sworn in as a constable and posted to ‘L’ Division, where he was billeted in a station house and shared a room with three other recruits. He was allocated a sergeant for the first few weeks as guide, philosopher and friend.

Sergeant Hamble had completed over forty years of service and could offer him little in the way of up-to-date advice. He despised the modern police helmet and spoke warmly of the top hat he had worn as a recruit. ‘Lined with best quality steel,’ he said. ‘You could sit on it if you were tired and stand on it if you wanted to look over some wall or fence. Couldn’t do that with the modern helmet, now, could you?’ He also considered that the rattle was better than the whistle that had replaced it.

In his dreams Luke sometimes saw the sergeant, his top hat at a rakish angle, advancing down the street whirring his rattle like a demented football fan. But such gleams of humour were few and far between in an existence that seemed to be uniformly and unendingly grey.

That he was lonely was natural. He was exchanging a place where he had known and been known by everyone for a place where no one knew him or cared anything about him. This might have been anticipated and in his heart of hearts he suspected that it was good for him. He had to learn to stand on his own feet. What had really upset him was the lack of action and movement.

Of all the divisions in London, ‘L’ had seemed the least exciting. It was neither one thing nor the other. Not a countrified division, like ‘P’ or ‘R’ which ran south into the fields and woods of Kent; nor a central division like ‘M’, which lay immediately to the north of them with one end just across the river from Westminster (‘the Government is vitally concerned by this development, Mr Holmes. Any help you can give will be much appreciated’), the other end embracing the garish riverside of Rotherhithe and Jamaica Road, the land of W. W. Jacobs.

And what had ‘L’ got to offer, for God’s sake?

Clapham, Brixton, Camberwell, Peckham. Places as dull as their names; places full of dull people, the cycle of whose lives seemed to be Saturday night drunkenness and Sunday morning repentance.

Nor had the situation been improved by the character and disposition of his superior officers. The division had been headed by Superintendent Garforth, the plain-clothes men were under Divisional Detective Inspector Cridland. The two men loathed each other. What time they could spare from inter-departmental fighting was spent in keeping the lower ranks in their place.

When Garforth learned that Luke was competent in French and fluent in Russian his first reaction was to distrust him. The next was to make use of him in the most tedious manner possible. There were court documents that needed translation and for the whole of one week, he had been loaned to a neighbouring division to take down everything that was said at an Anglo-French trade conference, translating into English any comments made. His thirty-two-page report went into Garforth’s desk and, Luke was certain, never saw the light of day again.

It was at the end of that particular week, at the darkest hour of his depression, that the clouds lifted. Joe Narrabone arrived. And better still, he and Joe had managed to get a room to themselves. Joe had been at the village school with Luke. He had been no sort of scholar, regarding the study of books as a waste of precious time. He had a genius for getting into trouble and wriggling out of it. He had been unquestionably, and with no near rival, the bad boy of the village.

Standing behind the form mistress, who was covering his exercise book with corrections, he had spent his time attaching the end of her skirt to the chair she was sitting on; so firmly that, the other boys being too weak with laughter to help her, the poor lady had been forced to hobble into the next-door classroom, dragging the chair with her, to report the outrage to the headmaster. This had earned Joe a record flogging, which he had repaid by climbing into the headmaster’s bedroom carrying a sack with a dead dog in it. As he explained to Luke with a gap-toothed grin, he had arranged the dog in the bed, with its head tastefully exposed on the pillow.

He was suspected of this outrage, but nothing could be proved.

His elders and betters had prophesied fates for Joe ranging from transportation to the gallows, but he had been unimpressed. Luke, being his total opposite in character, had naturally become his closest friend, a friendship which had produced one practical advantage. Joe had poached, consistently and successfully, in all coverts except those belonging to Sir George.

After leaving school, Joe had continued his career of rowdy misconduct and petty crime; until, as he explained to Luke, he got reformed.

‘T’wasn’t religion nor nothing like that,’ he explained. ‘Fact is, I got cotched selling pheasants I’d picked up. Told the beak I’d found them in the road, but somehow he diddun believe me. Result was, I got a proper whipping. Oh boy, don’t you ever try it. At school all they did was tickle you. This hurt. I diddun want no more of it. So I made up my mind. You know what they say – if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. And here I am.’ He had added, sitting on the bed drumming his boots on the floor, ‘At school you was always held up to me as a good example. A sort of saint, with one of those custard pie things round your head.’

At this point Luke had thrown a pillow at him and they had rolled on to the floor, trying to hold each other down. The noise had brought in Sergeant Hamble who had separated them and lectured them on the virtue of co-operation.