The Hellfire Conspiracy (18 page)

Beatrice Potter held out a gloved hand to me. “Thank you for coming to the lecture, Mr. Llewelyn. It was good of you to remember.”

“Not at all,” I answered, helping her into the cab. When she let go of my hand, there was a folded slip of paper in it, which I quickly thrust into my pocket.

Israel and I watched the hansom roll away. I turned and looked at my friend. “So, what did you really think of tonight’s lecture? I want your true opinion, not the one for publication.”

“My foot fell asleep halfway through that interminable lecture. I have never been envious of my own foot before.”

“Ah, but, Israel,” I said as we put on our gloves and raised our sticks for another cab, “it is the price one pays for female companionship.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING WE WERE OUT EARLY, FOR
Barker wanted to investigate the addresses Beatrice Potter had tracked down for us at the Charity Organization Society. She was more than the charming companion of the evening before.

“The first,” Barker said, “was a girl named Ruth Scoggins, adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Dodsworth of Twenty-two Saint Stephen’s Road. If we hurry, we might catch him.”

For once, luck was with us. Our knock upon the door of number 22 brought a large, uncouth man to the door, a serviette tucked into his shirt and his mouth still full.

“Wotcher want?” he demanded, still chewing his breakfast.

“To speak with you and your wife, Mr. Dodsworth, upon a very serious matter, the murder of your adopted daughter.”

The man swallowed, perhaps a trifle too quickly. He coughed several times. “Police?” he finally choked out.

“My name is Cyrus Barker. We are private enquiry agents, hired by another parent who lost a child.”

“Stay ’ere,” he said. “I’ll arsk the missus. She weren’t expecting company.”

We waited on the doorstep a good five minutes before the door opened and the woman of the house ushered us in. She looked like him, perhaps because married couples, through living together, take on the same shape and mannerisms. Mrs. Dodsworth was round and buxom and unkempt, but I suspected she had a good heart. She drew us into the kitchen that smelled of pie crust and almost belligerently tried to feed us. It took several protests and the acceptance of a cup of tea each before she relented and we were able to get to the matter at hand.

“It is no longer a secret that there is a man in the area that has been taking young girls and killing them,” my employer said. “I’m afraid your daughter was one of them. Scotland Yard has withheld the names of some of them from us, and yours was the first we uncovered. Would you be able to speak about it? It’s possible that even the most wee bit of information might offer a clue that will help us.”

Dodsworth looked at his wife and after she nodded, he did the same.

“It were a bad experience, sirs, I can tell you,” the man said. “She was a tough nut, was our Ruthie, and it came as no surprise she came to a bad end. Emmy and me, sir, we was never blessed with little ones, and one day she says, ‘Let’s go to the Poplar Orphanage and see about adopting a girl.’ She gets lonely when I’m at work, you see, and a girl would liven up the place. We went there, expecting to get a child of five or six, but Emmy clapped eye upon ten-year-old Ruthie and that was it. She wouldn’t be happy until Ruthie was home in our kitchen. She had the face of an angel, but the devil of a time during her early days. Blackguard of a father beat and half starved her. She walked to London all the way from Bristol, I ’ear, after he died o’ drink. Came to the orphanage by way of the Charity Organization Society.”

He sipped noisily from his cup. His wife, standing by the sink, had kneaded her apron in a bunch and was sniffing.

“It weren’t hard to adopt her. Most don’t want the older children ’cept as farm workers. Within a few days we had her in this very kitchen and Emmy promising to make her all manner of dresses. But the child were distant like and distrustful, not that I blame her. She weren’t in the house a fortnight ’fore she slipped anchor and took the best Sunday china with her.”

“She didn’t mean to do it,” Mrs. Dodsworth explained. “She weren’t happy and needed money to live on.”

“Now, don’t take on, Emmy, in front o’ the nice gentlemen.”

“Did you ever see her again?” my employer asked.

“I should say I did, and a sorry sight it was. I was coming home from the ’bacconist with a new twist one day, when I all but run into her in Cambridge Road, all dressed up like a dollymop with a swell on her arm. I laid into her, I can tell you, for breaking my Em’s heart. Almost got into it with her fancy man, as well, I were that angry.

“Didn’t see her after that, not alive, anyway. Three months later the River Police called me in to identify the body. A sorrier sight I’ve never seen and ne’er shall again. Her face, well, I’d rather not describe it, with Emmy in the room.”

Mrs. Dodsworth was crying now but doing it soundlessly.
This poor couple,
I thought.
They didn’t deserve such grief.

“So, that’s it, then. We decided we ain’t gonner adopt no more childrens. We let ourselves open and that were the consequence. We was happy before, weren’t we, Em? And we’ll be happy again, I reckon. Now, if you gentlemen don’t mind, I’ve got to get to work.”

“This man Ruth was with,” I spoke up. “Was he blond, with a pointed chin?”

“No, young man,” Mr. Dodsworth replied. “Dark fella, with a beard, not much above your own age.”

“Thank you, sir, for being so forthcoming. We regret any distress we may have caused. Come, Thomas.”

The second couple we visited was the Goldsteins. Their story began differently, but ended the same. Zinnah Goldstein was their own daughter, and they had high hopes for her future, until she was fourteen and took up with a young Irishman, despite their objections. She would not listen to her parents, and when he finally threw her over, she no longer cared for her reputation or her religion. The rabbi of Bevis Marks tried to forge a reconciliation, but before that could happen, she disappeared. It was the opinion of the Goldsteins that Zinnah threw herself off London Bridge. Sad as it was, it was more respectable a death than being murdered. Barker did not attempt to change their mind, even after learning the Goldsteins had come to the area through the C.O.S.

Alice Childers of Stepney had a penchant for dipping pockets. Her father, a former sailor, tossed her out to fend for herself. She’d been found in the river missing one ear. She’d once come to the C.O.S. to seek help after her father beat her.

Fanny Rice was thrown out by her parents, when she was found to be with child at aged twelve. The charity helped her through the baby’s birth, brief life, and death. Fanny had become a Whitechapel prostitute but eventually went missing. Her parents learned about her from the local constable, who read it on her police record.

Finally, Lizzy Gilbert, the last name on the list, was a good girl, her parents maintained, and would not hear otherwise. We were obliged to ask a neighbor about her. The girl, as it turned out, was given freedom to act as she pleased, and she did. She also had a police record at the tender age of thirteen.

Afterward, we were seated at a table in a public house called the Bread and Treacle, overlooking the Thames. Barker was finishing a plate of fried potatoes and egg. As with most meals, he pushed everything together. I prefer space between my food.

“Impressions?” Barker asked, patting his pockets for his tobacco pouch.

“Mine?” I foundered for a moment. “Well, sir, either accidentally or intentionally, they all are linked to the C.O.S.”

“We should continue to consider the connection between it and Mr. Miacca,” the Guv replied.

“He seems to hover over it like a malevolent spirit.”

“Apt, if a trifle flowery,” Barker said around the mouthpiece of his pipe. “Can you picture him putting gifts on the windowsills of good children in the area?”

“Yes, and punishing those like Ruth Scoggins.”

“It is not true, however, that all of Miacca’s victims were kept women. Gwendolyn DeVere certainly was not. I would think that while they are valuable mistresses they are safe, but once discarded by their patrons, they become candidates for Miacca’s attention.”

I looked at Barker, knowing some connection had just occurred in his brain.

“Blast!” he bellowed, shocking everyone in the room. He pulled a letter out of his pocket and opened it so quickly it ripped. It was Miacca’s last poem.

“What is it?”

“He’s toying with us.”

“Sir!” the manager said, coming to our table. “I must ask you to modulate your voice or leave.”

“Pay the man, lad,” my employer said, rising. “We’ve stayed here too long as it is.”

I paid him and followed the Guv outside. “What is it?” I asked. “Show me.”

“Look here,” he said. “‘I’m going on a killing spree.’ Do you see how the ‘a’ is out of place here. It’s too close to the word ‘on.’ Miacca is speaking of Ona Bellovich.”

“O
NA BELLOVICH,” I REPEATED IN HORROR.
“But she’s a good child. Everyone at the charity says so.”

“Not by Miacca’s standards, lad. She helped Gwendolyn DeVere escape and then sold her clothes. That would be enough to merit punishment in his book. We must go now. I just pray we are not too late.”

We squeezed our way through the narrow alleys until we came into Green Street. There were few cabs in Bethnal Green at this hour, but neither was there any decorum to uphold. Barker turned and began to run. I could do no more than follow as best I could.

We made our way to the tenement in Cheshire Street and plunged into it. The corridors were filled with loungers, most of them smoking or talking. Barker pushed his way through like a whaling ship breaking through Arctic ice. The Belloviches’ door was open. If I had any doubts the child was really gone, they fled now.

Svetlana Bellovich was seated at the table with a look of stark tragedy on her face. Her kerchief was off, her black hair wild and uncombed. Within a few hours fear and grief had etched circles under her eyes, and yet there was a grace to her grief that I believe Hypatia DeVere had not possessed. Tears poured down her face, but she sat rigid in her chair with her hands in her lap.

She looked up as Barker came toward her, and I wondered what he would do. He was not a comforting sort and always avoided emotion in others. He bent down and spoke quietly in her ear. After a moment, she rose from her chair and reached for him, clutching his lapels. In a shrill voice, she responded vehemently, and then my employer nodded and gently removed her hands. Then he turned, and the two of us quitted the room. I had misgivings about what had just occurred, but waited until we were in the street again before I voiced them.

“You promised her, didn’t you, sir?” I asked. “You promised you would bring her daughter back alive.”

“Aye,” came the impassive response.

“But you’ve warned me about making promises I was not sure I could keep.”

“I know, lad,” he said.

“You cannot guarantee the girl’s safety,” I pointed out.

“No,” he replied, swinging his cane as he walked. “I can only pledge that I will give my life, if necessary, to stop that monster from harming her. I have but one assurance.”

“What is that?”

“His pattern. At one point, he keeps his victims drugged. It’s likely they undergo some sort of ceremony or ritual. Then I suspect almost immediately afterward, his lusts become uncontrollable and he violates and murders them. Finally, sated, he clips off an extremity as a souvenir and discards the bodies, probably in a different place each time. He might even carry them in a sack. A young woman is generally small and light. Since the bodies have always been found on a Saturday or Sunday, the ceremony is probably held on a Friday, and this is but Thursday.”

“Are we going anywhere in particular, sir?” I asked.

“Of course. We’re not walking for our health. I am looking for the last place Miacca was seen. The child, Esme, said she met him in Collingwood Street.”

We headed south in the direction of the Jew’s burial ground. Slowly, we inspected each alley. Most were doorless or featured lodgings that were too well lit or cheerful for Miacca’s purposes, that is, until we came to the foot of the street, not far from Mile End Road, and found one that was narrow, dark, and crooked, perfect for the archfiend’s purposes. We passed into it and walked until we came to a heavily shadowed doorway with an overhanging eave. Barker stepped forward and seized a few boards that had been fastened across the door, rending them off the frame.

“They were screwed in,” he said, lighting a vesta, “and the brass heads are still new.”

“No tarnish on them,” I noted, shaking my head.

He blew out the match and dug in his waistcoat pocket. He generally kept a skeleton key there.

“Keep an eye out,” he ordered, going to work on the lock.

“You’re sure this is his lair?” I asked.

“It’s either his, or it’s deserted, if these boards are any indication.”

He worked on the lock for a few minutes before the door opened soundlessly in his hands.

“The hinges have been oiled,” my employer pointed out. “People don’t generally oil doors in the East End, unless they don’t want something to be heard.” The Guv pushed the door open with his arm against it, while I leaned over his shoulder. I got a glimpse of a dingy room with faded wallpaper and a few pieces of furniture. Then there was a loud pop, and suddenly my hat was knocked from my head.

“Damn and blast,” Barker growled. “You’re bleeding.”

My knees started to quiver, and the top of my head suddenly went cold. I could feel the blood seeping through my hair.

“Who—” I began, but Barker held up his hand.

“Nobody. It is a device, set to go off when the door was opened. Come here.”

Barker pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and laid it atop my head. “Hold it there,” he told me. “’Tis but a scratch. It is fortunate you’re such a wee lad, but then the bullet wasn’t meant for you, but Swanson or me. It would have caught either of us square in the face.”

I was only half listening, because I was staring at the engine that had tried to part my hair. It stood in the middle of the room, a vertical mass of planks and rusty gears, which cradled an old hunting rifle, still smoking and filling the room with the scent of gunpowder. There was a long dowel of wood projecting from it, with a tennis ball at the end. When the edge of the door struck the ball, it set off the mechanism that pulled the trigger. Miacca had planned to blow off the head of whoever first walked in here, and it was very nearly my own.

“My hat,” I said, bending down with one hand while clamping the Guv’s handkerchief to my head. I picked up my ruined bowler. There was a neat hole almost dead center in the front and back. I didn’t know if it was training or providence that had told Barker to push the door open while standing at the side of the doorway, but I felt a perfect donkey standing there in the middle like a target. Had I been five foot six instead of five foot four, I’d have been lying half out in the alleyway, on my way to the hereafter.

“Bolted,” Barker said, looking about. The room contained a metal bedstead with rumpled sheets, a table and two chairs, the infernal contraption, and a fireplace. There was a layer of fine soot over everything, not much, just enough to say Miacca had not been here in days. Naturally, our eyes were on the mechanism.

“Ingenious,” Barker said, moving the dowel back and forth. It had a metal cup at the end of a rod, with a piston-like piece attached to the trigger. They looked like manufactured parts, the kind one could find at an ironmonger’s. It was clever, in an evil, malignant sort of way.

“Sir,” I said. Something had caught my eye. A meerschaum pipe lay upon the table. Not Barker’s traveling pipe, which was now wrapped in the sealskin pouch in his pocket, but the new one from his office smoking cabinet, carved into a likeness of General Gordon. The only other item on the table was a box of vestas. Miacca was telling us he could go wherever he wished and that the instrument that just blew off my hat could as easily have blown off the head of our clerk, Jenkins. Barker snatched the pipe from the desk and thrust it into his pocket.

While Barker inspected the room, I dared lift his handkerchief from the top of my head. There is always something horrifying about looking at one’s own blood, scarlet against the white of a handkerchief. The Guv was right, however; I had merely been nicked and the blood had already begun to coagulate. I had cheated death once more.

“Here’s where the jar lay,” my employer said, pointing toward a spot on the mantel. Then he crossed to the bed and drew back the sheets. “A child has been kept here, by the looks of it. I assume it was Miss DeVere.”

“Was she sensible at any time, do you suppose, sir?” I asked. “She was drugged with chloroform or laudanum.”

“It cannot be easy to regulate drugs in an unwilling child. I am afraid she must have been awake for part of her time here.”

“Poor girl,” I said. There are times when words are so feeble as to be meaningless.

Barker lifted the mattress and began to look under it.

“What are you doing, sir?”

“I’m looking for a note. It is not like Miacca to be silent.”

He crossed to the door and closed it. As he predicted, there was the message, written in chalk across the back.

Barker fished in his waistcoat pocket and retrieved a small whistle with the word “Metropolitan” engraved across it and handed it to me.

“Lad, step into Collingwood Street and blow this until a constable arrives.”

I did and was almost dizzy by the time a constable finally pushed his way through the gathering crowd. Nothing attracts attention like the screech of a policeman’s whistle: the street was choked with people asking me questions about my head. The Guv had to bar the door with his arm, or the room would have filled with the curious and the bored, looking for something to excite their interest.

It took about half an hour for Inspector Swanson to arrive. He posted two constables outside to keep the rabble at bay and closed the door behind him.

Donald Swanson was a smart fellow, a “canny” sort, in Barker’s terms, and not a talkative man. He silently inspected the contraption in the center of the room, the message left by the killer, and the bed where Miacca’s victims once lay. He even noticed the ring of dust on the mantelpiece. Then, he examined the table, without touching the vestas. Finally, he looked at the layer of soot on the table. “What was here?” he asked.

The Guv pulled the pipe from his pocket and showed it to him.

“Gordon,” the inspector noted. “I would wash that in spirits if I were you. I wonder if it’s possible to poison a pipe.” He got down on his knees and very gently opened the box of matches, as if it would explode or contained a deadly spider, but no. It was only vestas.

“Shall we compare notes now?” my employer asked.

Swanson shook his head. “No, but if you wish, when this is all over, I’ll buy you a dram at the Red Lion and tell you as much as I dare.”

“I couldn’t live with the conditions you work under, Donald,” Barker said, “not for all the tea in Canton.”

“That’s all right,” Swanson said with a grim smile. “We would not have you.”

Barker grinned as well.

“Clear out, now,” the inspector said, pointing his thumb over his shoulder toward the door. “I’d ask you how you came to find this wretched lair, but you’d only want to trade it for a glimpse of the cards in my hand. We’ll talk later.”

“It’s just as well,” came the reply. “We have an urgent appointment.”

We left Swanson in charge of the room and headed back toward Green Street, pushing our way through the crowded alleyway.

“What urgent appointment do we have?” I asked, wondering if he had made it up to make us sound more professional.

“That bullet must have rattled you worse than I thought,” Barker said. “Have you forgotten you shall be stepping into the ring with Palmister Clay in an hour?”