The Humbug Murders (5 page)

“You, playing games,” Miss Owen said with a twinkle. “I should like to see it.”

I reached up to the corner of the embroidered tapestry tacked to the wall. The moment my hand touched its cold threads, I heard a ghostly sobbing echoing from the other side of the wall. I glanced at Miss Owen, who nodded at my unspoken question: she had heard it, too.

Then she looked down and I with her. Together we spotted the footprints in the dust matting the table, noted the items that had been swept from it: a pair of candles, scissors, a piece of cloth. Empty spaces among the dusty surface marked where each had been.

The scratching and the sobbing intensified. Nellie gasped in fear at the sounds, and the portly Sunderland tossed a protective arm about her shoulders.

The sound echoing from the other side of the wall rose from a man's throat.

The young man is innocent
, the spirit had insisted.

Could he have meant the poor creature secreted in a cubbyhole we adolescents used to play hide and seek? Perhaps this was one of Fezziwig's current apprentices, a child who witnessed the brutal events of last night?

Ignoring the strange lightness of the scurrying and the plaintive sounds, I shook off the unsettling memory of Fezziwig's apparition. It would not be Bedlam for me. I smacked at the corner of the embroidery and a panel popped open, just as I recalled. I pried it open, stuck my head inside.

Had I been wrong in my conclusions, I might well have been attacked by rats. As it was, I saw, in the dim light from the outer room, a sight nearly as frightful and ghastly as Fezziwig's spirit. A young man—though no child, perhaps of the same age as Miss Owen, two and twenty—with wild hair and wilder eyes clutching a carving knife. He was covered in blood. It matted his hair, dark, dried flakes peeling off his cheeks. He trembled, raising the blade defensively, but made no attempt to strike.

The young man is innocent.

“Call for Crabapple,” I said. “Tell them the murderer is ready to confess.”

With that, the man in the hole's sobs turned to shrieks and he lunged at me with the blade.

“BUTCHER!” THE MAN
howled as he struck at me with the bloody knife. I fell backward off the small table, narrowly evading the crimson blade's terrible arc, I collapsed onto my back on the floor as Rutledge and the others pressed themselves to the walls in shock and terror. The maniac sprang from the hidey-hole, pouncing on me, his weight enough to drive the breath from my lungs.

The blade sliced towards my face and stopped suddenly, an inch away from striking. For a moment, his dark eyes seemed to clear. Then his lips drew back in a snarl. “Not me. Not me, hear? You won't have
me
!”

“No!” Miss Owen screamed suddenly, and then made a move to rush towards the man, but the foreigner held her back.

My attacker drew the blade back—and something swept from the darkness to his left and clubbed the side of his head. The blade clattered to the floor as the blood-drenched man collapsed in a heap beside me. Miss Owen stared at the fallen man in horror as the foreigner firmed his grip on her struggling body. Then she looked away and began to sob.

Lord Rutledge stared at the rolling pin in his hand with wide-eyed amazement. He looked as if he might faint. Behind him, Miss Owen glared his way.

“I thought I was about to take a loss,” I said, my right hand protectively covering my throat. “Seven or eight pints' worth, at least!”

Not long after, I stood outside Fezziwig's establishment, watching as three policemen dragged my semi-conscious assailant through the light snow drifting about me. Crabapple was beside me. He should have been pleased, but he was not. The four who had discovered the body had been dismissed and evaporated from the scene quickly, but not before the constable and Shen exchanged odd hostile looks. Perhaps Crabapple didn't like foreigners? Or was there more to it?

The murder suspect was being led towards Crabapple's wagon, and soon he'd been done up in chains on the cold floor of the prison. Miss Owen stood at the edge of the crowd, shivering in the icy cold, watching the scene intently. Somewhere distant, carolers sang a merry tune, a mocking chorus to the dark proceedings of this day. Snow lazily whirled about us, carried on the indifferent breeze.

“Case closed,” mumbled Crabapple. “You and all your cronies may return to your lucrative businesses, yeah? To hell with answers. Or justice. Or the truth.”

I smiled thinly and hugged myself against the chill. “I thought you liked things simple, Constable. Murderer. Knife. Blood. Hang him. How could it be any simpler than that? Or is it that you don't believe he's guilty?”

“I'd like to. And as things sit now, he'll surely hang for it. But he's ranting and raving like he's afraid he'll be the next victim, and that just doesn't sit right. Those four Humperdink introduced you to . . . I stood listening at the door as they went on a fair while. There's quite a bit they're hiding, I'm certain of it. And you've hardly been forthcoming yourself! Nor that little lady of yours.”

“Miss Owen is not my ‘little lady.' But no matter. You can take heart that our reluctance has nothing to do with your courteous and efficient manner, Constable. You have a way with people that I believe is second to none. In fact, I'd wager you have a great number of well-wishers. They would all like to throw you down one.”

He glared at me. “Get out of here before I charge you with obstruction. But remember: innocent people tend not to spin wild stories or to hide the truth the way you lot did. All of you. There was something strange about the way I found you and that woman at your counting-house. And you saying ‘humbug' like that, the same thing scribbled on the wall beside the corpse. I'm not done with this, Mr. Scrooge. And neither are—”

The constable stopped short as a hundred paces ahead, a bulky man in an expensive coat opened his arms before Dickens and the flock of reporters who had glued themselves to his sides. The man brushed his neatly trimmed mustache and began to hold court for the crowd.

“Ah—damn!” Crabapple snarled.

“Inspector Foote, I would assume?” I asked. But Crabapple wasn't listening. He stormed off towards the ring of reporters and the inspector who was surely taking credit for the young man's arrest.

Crabapple stopped suddenly. “Hey now, what's this here?”

Miss Owen burst from the crowd just as the policemen slammed the gate on the wagon and clanged the lock. “Tom!” she screamed, and pushed past me, racing towards the wagon just as its horses neighed and the vehicle jolted into movement. “Tom, I'll help you, I know you're innocent!”

The face of the accused appeared in the back window of the wagon, his hands clutching the bars. He grimaced and yelled, “Be gone, wretched woman!”

Miss Owen began to run after the wagon as it trundled up the uneven road. I frowned, staring at the hands clenched around the bars, and before the wagon turned a cobbled corner, I noted a circle of pale skin about his ring finger. It looked about the size and shape of the peculiar ring Fezziwig had worn in both his final “ghostly” and earthbound states. But I wanted no more of this. I was a man of reason, a man of business, and I needed to be far from here.

I walked away, towards the river. I needed time to compose myself, order my thoughts . . . and banish the specter of my dead friend, which now haunted my reason.

It wasn't long before I saw that I was being followed. Miss Owen trudged after me, her boots sloshing in the snow, and her gaze locked fiercely on me each time I chanced a look over my shoulder.

I stopped and allowed her to catch up when I had reached a quiet alley in a derelict maze of damp brickwork. There was little evidence of Christmas approaching in this part of town, neglected by all but the most wretched. The bone-chilling December wind and the whipping sleet it carried were the only hints of the season.

Nobody would hear us in this shadowy spot.

“Mr. Scrooge, sir, please . . .” she began. “I know I have no right to ask, but will you help me?”

A pained sigh escaped me. “Miss Owen, I don't know what you would have of me. Employment is not a topic I wish to discuss now. Nor your evident connection to the man taken into custody for murder. Your . . . Tom.”

She flinched at the mention of his name but otherwise remained not just resolute, but hard as flint. It was difficult not to admire her strength. Yet I had been through much today.

I went on, “My oldest friend—a man who was more father to me than the wretch who sired me ever was—is murdered. I would have time, alone, to mourn. If that is not too much to ask?”

“Clearly it is,” she said insistently, taking my arm. “Considering your dead friend didn't wish to stay dead. Considering the warnings he came to deliver.”

I could not meet her gaze. “What is it you think you saw?”

“Everything you did. And I heard everything you heard. He said, ‘The young man is innocent.' Have you forgotten? It is my Tom he was speaking of. How can you have any doubt? And what could he have meant by ‘humbug'? He screamed the terrible word so frightfully that it still haunts me.”

“Humbug? No doubt that the killer is an imposter, a fraud of some sort. Or, more likely, that the whole ghastly situation is a setup. You ask me how I can have any doubt. Well, I doubt many things,” I said, shrugging from her grasp. “Most things,” I added, looking into her pleading eyes. “Including you.”

“Me?”

I felt hot anger rise in furious prickles up my face and walked briskly from the alley, towards the great bridge in the distance. “What we—what I experienced this morning was impossible. The only rational explanation is that something happened, yes, but not what I have been duped into believing. This city is crawling with charlatans and crooks. Those who prey on the living in the name of the dead. Table rappers. Fortune-tellers. Mystics and more. All done with mirrors, illusion, sleight-of-hand. Yuletide is the worst season for such tricksters. You recognized that scoundrel I ejected from my office. You share some bond with the man who threatened to kill me at Fezziwig's. Perhaps I have been drugged and hypnotized. Made to believe what you lot would have me believe so you might fleece my pockets and—”

We drew up suddenly, myself and Miss Owen, because next to the bridge was Fezziwig. Large as life. His back not bowed by the horrible toils of time, his hair grey, not salt-white. He was laughing, smiling, tolling a Christmas bell and holding a pail for charitable donations. The morning light ringed his ill-kempt locks in a way that never failed to bring a smile to me. A bit of drifting snow fell into my eye, startling me, and when I wiped it away, the bridge was empty once more.

I didn't realize how I was shaking until Miss Owen boldly took my hand.

“Mr. Scrooge—Ebenezer—if truly, in your bones, you believe I am nothing but some opportunist, if you think your mind and will so fragile they could be manipulated as you have described, then I will leave and you will never have to suffer my presence again. I would not displease anyone so. Let alone . . . suffice to say, a man of deep character, as I perceive you to be.”

I drew my hand away slowly. Adjusted my waistcoat and shawl. “I may know a barrister. I fail to see what else I can do for you. For your . . . for this Tom.” Was there a hint of jealousy in my tone? Absurd.

Miss Owen lowered her voice and leaned up to my ear. “There is more to it, and you know it. You heard what Fezziwig said,” she whispered, and my heart stopped. “He said that more would die.” She pulled herself away and stood tall, lifting her chin, and said, “Including you.”

Chills crept down me like thin cobwebs of dread. “And of the four suspects in Fezziwig's pantry just now? Did you believe the tales spun by any of the four in that room?”

“Not in their entirety. And you?”

“Not at all. Apart from the actress, I would say every one of them is lying.”