by Mark Walker
Blood Red Stars
A Kelly Riggs Mystery
Mark Evan Walker
PULP HERO PRESS
www.pulpheroPress.com
© 2019 Mark Evan Walker
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This is entirely a work of fiction whose characters are not intended to represent any real persons either living or dead, and any resemblance is purely coincidental. The exploits of these characters are not necessarily intended as an endorsement of their actions.
Editor: Bob McLain
Layout: Artisanal Text
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To My Late Parents with Love,
and
To the Memory of Yvonne Fletcher, WPC, Metropolitan Police, who died in the Line of Duty at St James’s Square, 17 April, 1984.
R.I.P.
Contents
Cover
Front Matter
A Note to the Reader
Prologue:The Notorious Blood Stars
Chapter 1:Crossroad at St James’s
Chapter 2:999 to Vine Street
Chapter 3:Enter Inspector Riggs
Chapter 4:The Dasher
Chapter 5:The Yard
Chapter 6:The Regulars
Chapter 7:A Crooked Clue or Two
Chapter 8:Fox with a Foggy Tail
Chapter 9:The Hand That Never Rests
Chapter 10:The Curse Begins
Chapter 11:Connections in the Bowels
Chapter 12:A Secret Life
Chapter 13:The Rats at Pratt’s
Chapter 14:Inside Look
Chapter 15:Parade at Scotland Yard
Chapter 16:Featured on the Gloom and Doom Report
Chapter 17:The Creeping Hand
Chapter 18:Tricks of the Trade
Chapter 19:The Man in the Mirror
Chapter 20:Close Calls
Chapter 21:Head of the Hand
Chapter 22:Too Hot to Handle
Chapter 23:Premiere Preview
Chapter 24:Bullets, Misses, and a Final Warning
Chapter 25:“Omelet”
Chapter 26:Col de Mort
Chapter 27:The Getaway
Chapter 28:Full Throttle
Chapter 29:The Last Option
Chapter 30:Tip Top
Chapter 31:Cards on the Table
Chapter 32:Another Cosmo, Another Problem
Chapter 33:Blood on the Stars
Epilogue
Further Investigations
The Next Case for Kelly Riggs
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A Note to the Reader
The world of Kelly Riggs is set in a slightly altered universe of the 1930s. Most things are about as they were, but others may seem a bit out of kilter. You may find an interesting anomaly or two, or maybe even more. See if you can spot them.
Most of the locations actually exist, and though not exact, the descriptions of Scotland Yard, its facilities, organization, and operations are very close in approximation of the times. The scientific lab was just then being established, and this was the dawn of modern forensic science as it has come to be known; an exciting time in crime detection.
This is a lightly re-edited edition of the original novel, with new and modified illustrations, and supplemental drawings.
These stories are meant to be a cultural connection, and as always, a homage: to those dedicated and tireless men and women of law enforcement across the globe, and to those purveyors of fiction, the authors of mystery and thrills and their “pulp” creations—the detectives, heroes, villains, dolls, dames, ladies, and Babes; their counterparts on the silver and Technicolor screens, and to another era, in hope that readers will be inspired to rediscover their exploits in all formats, and have a fine old time doing so.
Prologue
The Notorious Blood Stars
SHE WAS MORE THAN JUST A BABE. She was a Babe and a Half.
Men simply could not resist her. Women simply could not stand her. Men simply could not help but be enticed by her bounteous virtues, her seductiveness, pulsating within pale skin and a luscious hourglass figure. Or perhaps it was her dark eyes, her crown of velvety burnished hair or the way she dressed. Conversely, most women were envious, jealous, and outright hostile, but it mattered not to her, for she was more than just a Babe; and being a Babe and a Half, she did as she pleased. Her wake was strewn with the corpses of her many conquests.
One rainy afternoon an attractive, well-attired, but rather horrible woman, a Babe in fact, curled up on the sofa in her fashionable Mayfair flat to read a magazine. She came upon a story that instantly enthralled her.
Legend or Curse?
The Notorious Blood Stars of India
Special Report by Noël Thomas for Chic Mode Mag
Are the notorious Blood Stars of India simply a myth and a legend, or a real live curse that endures to this day? Read on, and make your own determinations and discovery.
Millions of years ago in a deep, dark cavern in eastern India there formed a pair of large, fiery red rubies. A ruby is a mineral crystal, aluminum oxide, and the name comes from the Latin for red—ruber—the color determined by the amount of chromium it contains.
Of the four precious stones (the others, of course, being the sapphire, the emerald, and the diamond), rubies are considered most precious, second only to colored diamonds. The value of rubies is determined by a number of factors, among them size, weight, and purity, but primarily by their color, the most valuable being “pigeon blood red.”
These two rubies were indeed blood red. However, there were impurities in them (an imbalance in the levels of titanium dioxide), which caused them to be especially unique, each having a large white star, known as an asterism. Both the rubies were identical in shape and size, as were their stars, with six points each.
Had the gems been translucent or transparent, they would have been cut and faceted with many planes or faces like most common diamonds. Yet due to their opaqueness, the mined rubies were polished to a highly reflective state. This method of fashioning turned them into what are called cabochons, completely smooth, so that the white stars were emphasized, gleaming inside piercing blood red eyes.
The story quite excited the attractive and well-dressed but rather horrible woman as she sat on her sofa in Mayfair. She flicked back a lock of dark coppery hair and arched a penciled brow. She chewed a ruby-red nail indelicately between her wide and gaudily painted red lips (for red was her favorite color) and continued reading further.
After their discovery in the thirteenth century, wherever the rubies went, a trail of avarice and death followed. Originally, the Stars were presented to the Raj of Darjeeling, who had them set into the eyes of his temple’s golden statue. There they had lived for nearly twenty-five years. The statue with the adorning rubies was quite revered, and became known as the Twin Star God. The rubies were highly prized, renowned throughout the subcontinent and amongst her peoples.
But their fineness caused jealousy, and the priest of a neighboring sect desired them. He sent his agents in the night to kill the Raj of Darjeeling and steal the Twin Star God—an endeavor in which they succeeded. Then, a short time later, the evil priest was himself murdered, his sect lost its following, and his particular temple and the Twin Star God fell out of favor.
The statue and the rubies were soon to disappear beneath a thick tangle of jungle overgrowth, where they languished for almost five hundred years.
It was only after the British colonization of India in the last century that the rubies were rediscovered by one of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s Own, in 1884.
However, they were soon destined to be lost again. Though the soldier had dutifully turned in his plunder to the major of his regiment, the Blood Stars (as they had come to be known) somehow managed to disappear from a strongbox in the major’s tent, and the major was found murdered.
It has even been rumored the rubies had been stolen by another British soldier, though nothing was ever proved, and the accusation is something which this writer considers unthinkable!
The Blood Stars were not to be seen again for twenty years, when they appeared briefly in a Parisian gallery. Here they remained for precisely ten days before being sold to a private collector residing in London.
From that day hence they have not been seen together again. For mere days after the private collector set them in his safe, his safe was burgled, and he, investigating odd noises, surprised the burglar, who slew him before making a getaway. But in the process the thief dropped one of the Blood Stars, and made off with only one. Shortly thereafter, the remaining Blood Star disappeared whilst the collector’s estate was being settled.
Yet it has been rediscovered after all these years.
And now you, too, can discover it for yourself.
The infamous Blood Star of India is right here in England, and this writer is thrilled to be the first to announce it will have its first public showing at a special exhibition at the Royal Academy starting in October, running through the end of the year!
This quite amused the attractive and well-dressed, but rather horrible woman, and her red lips writhed into a smile that accentuated her overly wide mouth. She fingered the jewel that dangled from a chain about her neck, for it was in fact the Blood Star stolen from the safe, and she thought, How, now! So the other Blood Star will be right here in London!
There was even a photograph in the article of the Stars together, taken some thirty years before in Paris. It had been colored, and the asterisms showed quite clearly.
As she focused on them, the whites showed round her black irises, and her eyes oddly reflected the Stars in the photograph.
The attractive and well-dressed, but rather horrible woman’s heart began to beat faster. She stared off into space and was briefly lost in thought before she continued reading.
The article went on to say that should the missing Star ever be found and the Blood Stars reunited, they were beyond value, priceless, and would be cherished by the British Museum or the Museum of Natural History. Why there was even talk that India might want them back!
The thought of them being anywhere else but together on the necklace round her throat, or hanging from her ears, or shining on her fingers niggled at her, because by the end of the article the attractive and well-dressed, but rather horrible woman had firmly decided she must have them both for herself.
So, she set about nagging her consort daily, incessantly, her fetid breath upon his neck, using every trick in her considerable arsenal of Babe skills to cajole, rage, storm, surrender, weep, and promise until he set a plan in motion to steal the other Blood Star from the exhibition.
For the woman’s paramour was none other than one of London’s most notorious criminals, and he made sure the attractive and well-dressed but rather horrible woman always got that which she desired, for she was, after all, a Babe and a Half.
But there is an old admonition: be careful what you desire, for the Blood Stars, like the legend of the Hope Diamond and other precious stones before it, bore a curse, bringing nothing but misery and destruction to those who have possessed them.
chapter one
Crossroad at St James’s
THE SENSATION OVER THE THEFT of the Blood Star had already subsided. The great apparatus known as Scotland Yard had started assigning detectives elsewhere, and the media had begun to lose interest.
This, of course, was all about to change. The robbery had been audacious in the extreme, pulled off by a team of three women dressed as widows. It was a simple misdirection ploy, followed by a smash and grab, with the widows departing in different directions, leaving not the wisp of a clue. Despite all the efforts of the Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard, the Blood Star had not been found.
But its present location was, in reality, only a few hundred yards from whence it had been stolen, in a building in the northwest corner of St James’s Square.
Had you been floating along blissfully in a Zeppo sky taxi, one of those magical old dirigibles that appeared briefly over London during the 1930s, you might have observed many things about St James’s Square that particular November afternoon. You might have noted that the square was rather large and dotted with huge trees and a variety of shrubs and foliage, and that at its center there stood a statue on a tall pedestal. Though the square is square, paths that reach into the park like spokes on a wheel converge in a circular path surrounding a wide lawn and the statue. A riot of turning, colored leaves were pushed along by a gusting wind, covering the paths here and there and whipping round the base of the statue. For just as the square’s spoke-like paths met in its center, the lives and fates of several persons there present would shortly be changed forever.
It is curious that the square possesses a statue not of St. James at its center, but rather the imperious figure of King William III sitting astride his horse, oblivious to the pigeons perched upon him. Had the statue itself been possessed of life, the king (notwithstanding the pigeons) would have been shocked and dismayed at the events about to occur under his very nose, as all of London soon would be. And from your seat in the Zeppo, high above the square, you might have observed many other curious things and interesting people.
The dignified square, situated virtually in the heart of London, was the height of respectability and proper British society. It still stands in one of the most stately and fashionable districts, surrounded by some of Britain’s most famous addresses: St James’s Palace, Regent Street, Jermyn Street, Pall Mall, Christie’s Auctioneers, and a host of embassies and exclusive private clubs. It was then a place to see men in bowler hats and high, stiff collars, women in furs with attendants, perambulators, and children playing. A smattering of this very class, along with many others, were gathered in a ragged ring beneath the statue in the center of the square.
This was where Kitt Sparrow and Trilby Warbler, performing as Sparrow and Warbler, had just completed the last of their concerts in the park, at least for a while, they hoped. The two songbirds were both West End chorus girls, but often sang and performed for tips as buskers when they were “between engagements,” which recently had seemed to be all too often. However, they were back in rehearsals that very night, as last-minute replacements in a new musical production opening at the nearby Criterion Theatre at Piccadilly Circus.
Many a Londoner had taken to having a stroll through the square just around tea in hopes of catching their lilting melodies. Kitt was a perpetually upbeat girl from Lambeth, reminiscent of the leggy actress Googie Withers, with long blonde hair in a permanent wave. Trilby was a nonstop chatterer with cascades of dark brown curls. Both girls wore hats and waifish, gypsy clown costumes over their comely figures. Their friend, a tall, gangly young backstage hang-about named Toby Knockknees who sometimes accompanied them on squeezebox or harmonica, was passing round the hat for tips.
That day the audience included a young nanny, Brendalynn Welles, and her charges, the Presco
tt children. Slender, ivory-skinned, with jet-black hair and stunning blue eyes, she was presently acting as a nanny and tutor, though her real ambition, for which she studied hard most evenings after putting the children to bed, was to become a law clerk, and then perhaps a barrister. Brendalynn knew the songbirds well, Toby only slightly, and was always fascinated with their life in “show business,” so she left the children for a few moments with the oldest, Michael, in charge.
From the Zeppo you would have to have been looking very carefully to see a rather slight boy skirting the edges of the spectators. He moved quickly, flitting in and around the slowly dissipating audience, much like an annoying mosquito. He was a friend of Toby Knockknees, his name was Johnny Glams, and although Toby didn’t know it, his younger friend was, in police parlance, a whizzer, which in laymen’s terms means pickpocket. Nearby on the green, autumnal lawn, the Prescott children were busy playing in the piles of leaves—Michael and his sisters, Mandy who was one year younger, and little Jenny.
At first Michael had grumbled at the imposition of having to watch his sisters for the sociable Miss Welles, but he quickly accepted his assignment with grace, and more than just a little pride. It made him feel quite manly and responsible, for he felt very protective of his sisters and was quite fond of them. They had finished their tutoring day early and gone to the library with Miss Welles for their weekly visit. Their father, who held a civil servant position in the government, was out of town, and their mum had passed away several years before. But they hadn’t an empty nest to return to, for Miss Welles would accompany them, and at home, Cook was preparing a delicious blackberry crumble. The aroma from the kitchen was intoxicating, but unfortunately, the children would not get to smell the freshly baked dessert that day.
Unlike his rather bookish and studious sister, Michael liked the out-of-doors, and spent far too much time staring wistfully out the window during lessons. Today, despite his responsibilities, he, too, longed to learn more about show business and rather wished he were conversing with the adults rather than being left to watch mere children. It seemed as though all the excitement always happened in the adult world, and they were the only ones who had any real fun. He even muttered so under his breath. In his frustration, he kicked a pile of leaves.