“She has no family? No employer?”
“Not anymore, no.”
“Might I ask what she does for a living, precisely?”
“She’s been working as a language tutor,” I said, brushing invisible dust off my hat. “Freelance.”
“And now she’s here, with no belongings, in a ragged dress soaked in blood.” She raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Teaching languages must be a riskier occupation than I’d imagined.”
I sighed. Perhaps I could have thought up a better story before we’d arrived, but it would have been futile—Amelia could read me like a tuppenny novel. When I leaned down to kiss her, she reluctantly proffered her cheek.
“Don’t wait up,” I said. “And tell no one she’s here.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. Though I daresay your children might notice.”
* * *
—
Before returning to Scotland Yard I dropped in on a few dubious acquaintances—fences, dips and buttoners—who owed me a favour or wanted to get in my good books. Our ordinary decent criminals, with their own quaint codes of propriety and honour, despised foreign agitators even more than the “respectable” classes did.
But none of my shady contacts had information on our fugitives. I wasn’t entirely surprised—Akushku was no common criminal, and this club Miss Minetti had heard him mention was clearly part of a fallback plan. Before we’d even left the infirmary I’d sent a note back to the office telling my team to check out radical clubs within a mile of our encounter, and as soon as I got back to my desk I set about compiling a list of every other sort of club in the East End—social, religious, chess clubs and sports clubs—but I’d barely started when there was a rap on my door.
“Chief—visitor for you, sir.” Constable Lawrence manned reception in rotation with Jenkins, and though he was going on twenty-two he was so fresh-faced he could have passed for fifteen.
“I’ve no time for visitors,” I growled.
“German chap, sir, name of Steinhauer?”
* * *
—
I found Gustav waiting on one of the hard benches by the street door, reading the Times. Looking up at me he beamed.
“Chief Superintendent! Hello again.” He rose and shook my hand firmly. “How goes the search?”
“It’s in hand, thank you, Gustav. How was that hotel I found for you?”
“It is excellent, a home from home.”
I nodded at the neat repair on the upper arm of his topcoat. “You didn’t buy yourself a new coat?”
“Oh!” Steinhauer glanced down at the rip the bullet had left in his sleeve, now neatly mended. “I changed my mind. This one is much too good to throw away.”
“Your tailor did a good job. You must let me have his name.”
Steinhauer smiled; he knew I was fishing. The Jewish German tailors of the East End, exiles from their homeland, were socialists almost to a man, and so pure of principle they would not even hire assistants, employment being by its very nature exploitation. They had little love for British policemen, and even less for the Kaiser’s—hence their presence here—but, of course, Steinhauer would hardly have identified himself as an Imperial official.
“William,” chided Steinhauer. “A man of your resources, who knows London like the back of his hand, hardly needs me to recommend a tailor. But I did hear some gossip you might find interesting. Shall we talk in your office?”
“You know, I fancy some fresh air. Let’s go for a walk.”
“Fresh air” in London is a relative term, of course. We strolled west along the Embankment, where the fumes of the barges steaming up and down the Thames hung heavy in the air. Dusk was gathering and it was damnably cold; we walked with our hands buried deep in our pockets and our shoulders hunched, as the redbrick battlements of Scotland Yard receded into the smoky mist.
“Have you reported to your King on our adventures of last night?” asked Steinhauer.
“Not yet,” I said. “Though I shouldn’t put it off much longer. What about you?”
“His Imperial Majesty would rather hear about solutions than problems, and I would rather oblige him by waiting until we have some good news. After all, the threat is no greater than it was yesterday. It is one-third less, in fact, since you killed Averbukh.”
“Except that now Akushku knows we are on to him.”
“He knows, yes, but what practical difference will that make? He may have gone to ground, but he was not exactly advertising his presence before. And now he has a wounded colleague to worry about.”
“True.”
“They will be seeking medical attention soon, if they have not already. Perhaps that is an avenue your people could pursue?”
“We’re not totally incompetent, Gustav, though after last night you’d be forgiven for thinking so. No, we’re on to that, and now we have another lead: Akushku and Bozidar may be hiding out at a place they referred to as ‘the club.’ ” I didn’t mention my source was Angela Minetti. He didn’t need to know, and the fewer who learned the girl was lodging with my own family, the safer she would be.
“But this is excellent! Are there many clubs in the area?”
“Only about a thousand,” I said. “And that’s presuming it’s not a reference to some secret society, or even a private joke. But what’s this piece of gossip you mentioned?”
“Ah yes. Our man Akushku, I think he is not what he seems. He and his friends spoke in Russian, and he uses this Russian nom-de-guerre, but…”
“You think that’s intended to throw us off the scent?”
“I am told our man is Latvian. And the Latvians, as you know, have little love for their Russian masters.”
“Indeed,” I answered vaguely, trying to disguise how much my mind was whirling.
Because Jakob Piotr was a Latvian, and in the Lyons Tea Room he had told me about a stranger at that last meeting of his dissident countrymen: a man in his thirties, possibly American, with a military bearing. And beside me at that moment walked a man who fitted the description all too well—Steinhauer himself. Yes, the stranger at that meeting had sported a moustache, but that was easily faked.
What mischief might Steinhauer have been up to there? Long before the Kaiser’s yacht had even docked in England?
“This gossipy source of yours,” I said. “I don’t suppose he told you Akushku’s real name?”
“No, and it would be worthless if he had. Radicals like Akushku change their names as often as you and I change our shirt-collars.”
“True enough. Latvian, eh? I’ll make some enquiries.” And not just about Akushku, I thought.
9
When Conan Doyle’s fanciful nonsense first appeared in the Strand Magazine, I had tried to enjoy it, but soon gave up. The British public, on the other hand, took Sherlock Holmes to their hearts, and who could blame them? Ingenious detectives catching ingenious villains makes for splendid entertainment—unlike the daily grind of genuine police work. Real-life coppers nail criminals by knowing their patch, asking endless questions and getting tip-offs from informants. It helps that so few criminals are geniuses: instead they are, for the most part, sloppy, boastful and/or stupid.
Akushku, however, seemed to be none of these. Late last night I had sent telegrams to my counterparts on the Continent, asking if they’d ever heard of him; no joy. And this evening, as my men reported in at debriefing, it became clear they’d had no more luck than me. The officers I had sent to comb Minetti’s neighbourhood had knocked on every door in her street and for three streets in every direction, and spoken to every family crammed into those ramshackle old mansions. They had visited every clinic, infirmary, doctor and nurse within a two-mile radius, asking if they had treated a patient suffering from bullet wounds. They had visited a dozen political clubs, and invented pretexts to search their premises, but there was no sig
n whatsoever of our quarry.
I told myself this was progress of a sort. If the two fugitives had not obtained medical help by now, they would be weaker and more desperate, more likely to make mistakes—they might even try to flee the country. I made a note to tell my men stationed at Britain’s ports to keep an eye on departures as well as arrivals.
Last to make their report were Johnson and Connolly. From the eagerness on Connolly’s face—even the gloomy Johnson was wearing a faint smirk—I could tell they were bearing good tidings, and I’d left them until last on purpose; ending this debrief on a positive note would boost morale. When I called on them, Johnson started to flick through his notebook, but Connolly couldn’t contain himself.
“That fan you took from the young lady’s lodgings, sir,” he blurted out. “It was part of a range of fans imported from Budapest. In Hungary.”
“I know where Budapest is, Sergeant,” I said.
“Yes, sir, sorry,” he said, face reddening. “They ranged in price from ten to fifteen guineas, not the sort of item a tart”—he corrected himself, reddening some more—“I mean, a young lady in her walk of life would normally afford, sir.”
“Rather than go from shop to shop, trying to find out where they had been sold,” butted in Johnson, without deigning to look at Connolly, “we thought we would talk to the importer, and take it from there.”
“Good thinking,” I said. “And?”
Johnson consulted his notebook. “The importer and distributor were one and the same—a Mr. John deLauncey of Eastern Enterprises Limited, with offices near Smithfield. He told us that he had supplied only a few dozen of these particular fans, to Whiteleys of Bayswater, Pratt’s, Swan and Edgar in Piccadilly and Marshall and Snelgrove on de Vere Street. We’ve been to the first two, and the management let us see their ledgers, so we have a full list of their purchasers.”
“But Marshall and Snelgrove had closed, sir,” said Connolly, to Johnson’s irritation. “We plan to call in there first thing Monday.”
“Good work, both of you,” I said. I rounded up by expanding our new line of enquiry—finding this “club” where Akushku had taken Bozidar. I named teams that from tomorrow would start checking out my list. “I know it won’t be an easy task, especially on a Sunday, and there are a few dozen candidates within reach of Whitechapel, but if we work hard and methodically we will track these men down.
“And whichever of you does, you are to keep them under observation and summon reinforcements right away. Do not on any account try to tackle them by yourselves.”
A few of the men were discreetly checking their watches, looking forward to hearth and home after a long day. I felt a stab of pity for them, but stifled it. I would see little enough of my own bed while this crisis was upon us, and neither would they, and that was what we’d all signed up for.
“Gentlemen, you’ve done sterling work today, and you can all be proud of yourselves.” There was a muttered chorus of thanks, but I carried on, talking over it. “And none of us are done just yet. Report for duty in the yard in twenty minutes. The Committee for Latvian Liberty meets tonight in Brewer Street, and we’re going to pay them a visit.”
* * *
—
I stood patiently waiting as O’Brien, the custody officer, unhooked the keys from his belt, unlocked the cell door and pulled it squealing open. I was carrying a tin plate draped in a cloth, by way of a peace offering to my guest. “That’ll be all, thank you, Sergeant,” I said. “I think I can manage.”
O’Brien nodded and stepped out again, and the heavy door clanged shut behind him. I placed the dinner plate on the steel table bolted to the floor and lifted the cloth. “I brought this for you, from the canteen,” I told Jakob. He eyed the raw steak with little interest, and leaned back in his chair with his handcuffed wrists resting in his lap.
“I am not hungry,” he said. His jacket was filthy, the collar was half-torn from his shirt, his left eye was swollen half-closed, and he had a fat lip.
“It’s for your eye, you buck eejit.” I pulled back the chair facing him, sat down and stretched out the fingers of my right hand. I’d scraped my own knuckles raw against the pavement helping to restrain one young firebrand. Our visit to the Latvian Liberty meeting had not been warmly received; several chairs, one window and two noses had been broken in the fracas. It was pretty much the outcome I had expected—in fact had counted on. When Jakob was dragged from the building and chucked in the back of our Black Maria, then hauled from his holding cell to this interrogation room, his fellow radicals would have seen nothing suspicious.
“I’m sorry about your injuries, Jakob, but they are your own fault. You didn’t have to make such a song and dance about resisting arrest. Indeed, some of your friends might have thought you were protesting too much.”
“I was not making a ‘song and dance,’ ” Jakob spat, with real indignation. “We were having a peaceful political meeting and you had no right to break it up. You are always boasting that England is the country of free speech—is this free speech?” He gestured to his purple eye socket.
I shrugged. “Freer than most.”
“You told me that here, as long as there was no incitement to crime, a man could think and say what he wanted. There was no incitement to crime at our meeting. Ask anyone. Ask the policemen you had planted in the audience. No one was proposing violence or even disobedience—we were discussing the rights of man.”
“An admirable concept, I’m sure.”
“Is it because we are foreign that we have no rights? So much for equality under the law.”
“You have precisely the same rights as any of the King’s subjects,” I said. “Which are whatever rights the Crown sees fit to allow, at any particular time.”
Jakob snorted in derision. “Then your freedom of speech is a fiction. Your men are thugs, just like the Tsar’s thugs, but with better manners.”
The lad was starting to annoy me. It occurred to me I could enhance his credibility with his fellow anarchists by blacking his other eye for him, but that would only have proved his point. I took a deep breath instead.
“Freedom of speech,” I said, “is an ideal to which we aspire. And on occasions we fall short, because our hospitality is sometimes abused, and our tolerance is mistaken for licence. We’re not like the Tsar’s secret police. You and your friends will be free to go home in the morning—at least, the ones who didn’t take a swing at my officers. If we were the Okhrana you’d be on your way to a Siberian salt mine, or a firing squad, right now. So don’t give me any more of your nonsense.”
He fell silent and stared at me, glowering.
“Maybe no one was discussing violence or sedition tonight, I really don’t care. We raided that place to remind your friends who’s boss. And because I needed to talk to you, and it couldn’t wait until next month.”
Now Jakob tilted his head to one side, curiosity mingling with his contempt. “I am not in the mood for conversation.” The look on his face saddened me. All those high ideals and the noble ambition of youth, unsullied by harsh reality and impossible choices.
“I can have this cooked if you’d like,” I said, nodding at the bloody steak. “I’d go for rare if I were you. The canteen meat is so tough you could sole your boots with it.”
“I am not hungry,” Jakob insisted. I sighed.
“Jakob, Her Late Majesty Queen Victoria is being laid to rest next weekend. There’s going to be a state funeral, and half of Europe’s royalty will be there.”
“Sadly, I have a prior engagement,” said Jakob—with the ghost of a smile, at last.
“Will any of your friends be attending?”
“To laugh, maybe. For myself…I have never cared much for the circus.”
“What about Akushku?” I said, staring him straight in the eye. “Will he be coming?” I saw his eyes widen, in what looked
like surprise or apprehension. Then he frowned in incomprehension, slightly too late.
“Who is this Akushku?”
“Don’t pretend you’ve never heard of him, Jakob. He’s a nihilist, a terrorist. He was planning to attack the funeral cortege with two comrades. We nearly had him last night, but he and one of his friends escaped. They’ve gone to ground somewhere in London, and I need to know where.”
“You expect me to know?”
“I’m told this man is Latvian. Like you.” I watched him closely. Jakob snorted. “You know everybody in the movement,” I said.
“I do not know him. And even if I did, even if I knew where this Akushku was, why would I tell you?”
“Because of the man you are, Jakob. You’re a revolutionary socialist, and you’re an idealist, but you’re not cruel and you’re not a fanatic. You’re not the sort who would slaughter women and children and working men and claim it was for their own good. This man Akushku wants to start a war in Europe, and I mean to stop him.”
Jakob nodded, listening, a smile slowing growing clearer on his face. He leaned forwards, placing his wrists on the table as if to display to me his chains, though it was I who had put them there.
“Chief Superintendent Melville…” He concentrated, as if about to explain a challenging concept to a child. “You think you know me. But you do not. You know nothing about me, or what I believe in, or the sacrifices I am prepared to make. Yes, I am an idealist—I want to remake the world so there is no need for men like you, so that men like you will not have to exist. You and I meet, and we talk, and you come to our lectures and you read our magazines and you listen to our plans, but you do not hear what we are saying. You cannot see the simple truth. And this is because you cannot understand it, any more than a dog could understand astronomy, any more than the bricks in these walls understand that they are part of a prison.”
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