Blackstone and the Burning Secret (The Blackstone Detective Series Book 4)

by Sally Spencer

  Both the rowers were dressed entirely in black—a wise precaution. And though they were close enough to hail him, neither of the men had yet said a word, which was also wise for men who were not entirely sure of the situation they were going into.

  The captain began to lick his lips at the thought of the extra cash which would come to him as the reward for his willingness to grab an opportunity when it was offered to him.

  ‘Have you brought the money?’ he called down.

  The skiffs bumped against the side of the sloop, but still the watermen maintained their silence.

  ‘My crew will not hear you, however loudly you speak,’ the captain said heartily. ‘I got them all good and drunk last night. They’ll be out cold until the morning.’

  The watermen made no response, but now there was a banging noise—which only they could have produced.

  What, in God’s name, was their bloody game? Captain van Diemen asked himself.

  It sounded as if the men were hammering something straight into the side of the sloop.

  But why would they do that? Didn’t they realise that even men as drunk as his crew undoubtedly were would be bound to wake up if this thundering noise continued? Didn’t they understand that if his men did wake up, they would soon grasp what was going on, and demand a share of the profits for themselves? Had they any idea of how much it would disappoint him to split this unexpected windfall, rather than keeping it all for himself?

  ‘You need do nothing to the ship,’ the captain shouted down to the watermen below. ‘I will throw you a rope with which you may moor your boats.’

  The banging continued.

  ‘I have hung a rope ladder over the side of the ship,’ the captain said, now sounding slightly desperate. ‘If you wish to come aboard, you have only to use that.’

  One of the men below climbed—rather awkwardly—into his companion’s craft. The original occupant of the lighter used his oar to push the boat away from the Golden Tulip—and the two men began to row towards the shore.

  ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ the captain called after them. ‘We had a deal.’

  But what kind of deal could it be, if they left not only the eels but also one of their boats?

  The men were rowing rapidly—almost desperately rapidly, it seemed to van Diemen—towards the shore. And though there was no real reason to worry—yet—the captain felt a drop of moisture fall on to his hand, and realised that he had begun to sweat.

  The explosion—when it came—was not excessively loud, but echoing across the silent river it seemed enormous. The Golden Tulip rocked slightly, and then the captain, looking over the side, saw that flames had begun to lick at the sides of his ship.

  *

  Blackstone stood on a landing jetty a short distance from Billingsgate Fish Market, studying the blackened and semi-submerged wreck of what had once been a Dutch sloop called the Golden Tulip.

  ‘She’s playing havoc with the river traffic,’ said Leading Fireman Harris, who was standing next to him.

  That was true enough, Blackstone thought. The other Dutch sloops were having to execute complex and ungainly manoeuvres in order to get around the wreck and reach the jetty where the porters were waiting impatiently to unload their cargoes.

  And other craft on the river were suffering, too. Barges, instead of simply going with the current, were forced to veer away and fight against it. Steamers, rather than ploughing proudly on, were compelled to halt their engines until more sluggish boats had negotiated the hazards.

  The sinking of the Golden Tulip had, in effect, created a traffic jam as dense as any that might be found on any other busy London thoroughfare.

  ‘The river authorities say they’re sending a tug to deal with the problem,’ Harris continued, ‘but even if they succeed, it’ll be hours before things get back to normal.’

  Which was just what the arsonist—if indeed it was the same arsonist—would have wanted, Blackstone thought. ‘What exactly happened?’ he asked.

  ‘As far as I can piece it together, two blokes moored a skiff to the sloop in the middle of the night. There was some sort of explosion, then the sloop caught fire,’ Harris said. ‘It could have been worse, I suppose.’

  ‘Hard to see how it could have been much worse for the Golden Tulip,’ Blackstone commented.

  Harris grinned. ‘True,’ he agreed. ‘But the fire could so easily have spread to the other sloops, as well.’

  ‘And why didn’t it?’

  ‘There’s two reasons. The first was the alarm was raised quickly, because the captain of the Golden Tulip was, as it happened, up on deck when the fire actually started.’

  ‘Up on deck?’ Blackstone repeated. ‘At two o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘Did he give you any explanation for it?’

  ‘He said he was having one last smoke before he finally turned in for the night.’

  ‘And what time would he have begun to supervise the unloading of his cargo in the morning?’

  ‘I’ve never been a fish porter myself, but I’d guess it would be some time between five and six o’clock.’

  ‘Five or six o’clock,’ Blackstone said reflectively. ‘Hmm, this captain certainly doesn’t seem to need much sleep. What was the other reason the conflagration wasn’t any worse?’

  ‘The floating fire station.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It just happened to be moored nearby. If it had been further up river—as it often is—we’d have been in a real mess.’

  ‘Is there any connection between this fire and the one in the tea warehouse?’ Blackstone asked.

  Harris looked dubious. ‘On the face of it, I’d have to say that no, there wasn’t,’ he said. ‘The fire in the warehouse, as you know yourself, was a bit of a botched job.’

  ‘Or appeared to be a bit of a botched job,’ Blackstone mused.

  ‘Appeared to be?’ Harris echoed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What about this one?’ Blackstone asked, ignoring the leading fireman’s question.

  ‘This one is much more sophisticated,’ Harris told him. ‘As I said, the captain reported hearing an explosion.’

  ‘So there was a bomb on the skiff?’

  ‘Yes, but probably not what you immediately think of when you hear the word. I’d guess it was an incendiary bomb. In other words, it was a bomb intended to spread a fire rather than blow the ship up.’

  ‘Would it be difficult to make a bomb like that?’ Blackstone wondered aloud.

  ‘Any bomb’s difficult to make if you don’t know what you’re doing,’ Harris said, ‘but for someone with a little experience of working with explosives, it shouldn’t have presented too much of a problem. The trickiest part would have been the timer, and I do think our blokes slipped up a bit there.’

  ‘Do you? Why?’

  ‘It went off before they reached the shore again. If I’d been setting a bomb like that, I’d have made sure I was on dry land before it ignited.’

  ‘Still, they got away with it,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Seem to,’ Harris agreed, ‘but the fact remains that they so easily might not have done.’

  Sergeant Patterson appeared at the end of the jetty. He was red-faced, as if he’d been running. ‘We’ve found a body in the river, sir,’ he told Blackstone.

  ‘What kind of body?’ Blackstone asked.

  The question seemed to throw Patterson a little off balance. ‘A dead one,’ he said.

  Blackstone sighed. ‘They’re always fishing bodies out of the Thames,’ he said. ‘Sometimes there seem to be more of them in the river than there are in the morgue. But does this particular stiff have anything to do with our investigation?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I think it very well might,’ the Sergeant replied.

  ‘Then we’d better go and have a look at it, hadn’t we, Sergeant?’ Blackstone said.

  10

  The corpse had been placed on a long s
tone slab which was normally used to display skate and haddock. He was lying on his back, his lifeless eyes fixed on the ceiling of the fish hall. Porters rushed past, being careful not to bark their knees against the slab, but otherwise paying the dead man no attention at all. The constable posted to stand guard over the body wrinkled his nose almost continually—as if to say that if he never smelled fish again, it would still be too soon.

  Blackstone looked down at the slab. The dead man was wearing a dark loose jacket, a dark pullover, and dark trousers. His face and hands were covered with some kind of black grease, but even with his camouflage, it was obvious that he was not—as the Inspector had hoped he might be—the man who had spent two nights in St Saviour’s.

  Blackstone paced from one end of the slab to the other. The dead man was around five feet nine inches tall, he estimated, and though the grease on his face covered up many tell-tale signs, the Inspector would still have guessed that he had been about thirty-five.

  ‘He got himself entangled with the supports under the pier,’ Patterson said. ‘If he hadn’t, the tide might have carried him several miles downriver by now.’

  ‘Cause of death?’ Blackstone asked crisply.

  ‘It’s always possible he drowned,’ Patterson replied, ‘but if I had to place a bet, I’d put my money on that.’

  ‘That’ was a large piece of metal which was firmly embedded in the corpse’s chest.

  Blackstone crouched down to get a closer look at it. The end which had pierced the body was slightly tapered, almost like a knife blade. The other end was much chunkier. Strands of a lighter-coloured, less substantial material were clinging to the chunkier end, and when Blackstone prised one of them free, he found that it was a sliver of wood.

  ‘So what do you think it is?’ he asked his assistant.

  ‘Looks to me like part of the whatchamacallit that the oar of a skiff rests in,’ Patterson said.

  ‘Rowlocks,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but I don’t think you can dismiss my suggestion as easily as that,’ Patterson protested.

  ‘I said “rowlocks”, not “bollocks”,’ Blackstone told his Sergeant. ‘The whatchamacallit that the oar of a skiff rests in is called a rowlock. And I think you’re right—that’s exactly what it is.’

  I’d have made sure I was on dry land before the bomb ignited, Leading Fireman Harris had said.

  But either by design—or by accident—the two arsonists hadn’t done that. And one of them had paid the ultimate price for it, because it was more than possible that this rowlock had come from the skiff which had blown up.

  ‘Of course, we still don’t know whether or not this particular attack has anything at all to do with the Tooley Street fire,’ the Inspector pointed out to his assistant.

  ‘Maybe if you looked in his pockets, you might find something to tie him in with our investigation,’ Patterson said, with the verbal flourish of a magician producing a rabbit from his top hat.

  ‘Brilliant!’ Blackstone said dourly. ‘And to think that you’re still only a detective sergeant.’

  He reached into the dead man’s pocket. The cloth was good quality, but was also soaked through, and felt unpleasant against his skin. Nor did he particularly relish the fact that the further his hand entered the pocket, the more his knuckles were pressed against the stiff, dead meat which was all that was left of the living, breathing man of a few hours earlier.

  His fingers brushed against something slimy.

  A fish? No, it was the wrong shape for a fish.

  Blackstone grasped the object by its corner, and extracted it carefully from the pocket.

  What he had in his hand was a thin, rectangular package, wrapped in oilskin. The Inspector stripped away the oilskin, and found an envelope—addressed to himself—inside it.

  ‘Well, that clears up any questions about whether or not the two incidents are related,’ he told Patterson, showing him the envelope.

  The letter itself presented no major surprises.

  ‘HOW MUCH DAMAGE DO YOU THINK I’VE DONE WITH THIS NIGHT’S WORK, MR BLACKSTONE?’ the note read. ‘AND HOW MUCH MORE DAMAGE DO YOU THINK I’LL DO THE NEXT TIME? IF I WAS YOU, I’D TALK TO MY BOSSES ABOUT PUTTING THAT ADVERTISEMENT IN THE PAPER.’

  ‘He was obviously planning to leave this note somewhere we’d be bound to find it,’ Blackstone said. ‘Then he got a little distracted, due to being unexpectedly killed.’

  ‘Anything else on him?’ Patterson asked.

  ‘I won’t know till I’ve looked, will I?’

  Blackstone searched the dead man’s other pockets, and came up with a modest haul. There was a packet of cigarettes—so thoroughly drenched with Thames water that even the most desperate of smokers would think twice before trying to dry them out—and a sodden box of safety matches. There was an iron nail, approximately six inches long. And there was an expensive embossed card, with raised printing on its face.

  Blackstone examined the cigarettes first.

  ‘Woodbines!’ he said in disgust. ‘Just about the most popular fags around! If this had all happened in one of those detective novels that everybody seems to be reading these days, it wouldn’t have been bloody Woodbines he had in his pocket at all.’

  ‘Then what would it have been?’

  ‘It would have been an exclusive brand which could only be obtained from one tobacconist in the whole of London. And this tobacconist would not only have had perfect recall, but would have been able to tell us the name and address of the person who bought the cigarettes.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t have been the dead man who bought them,’ Patterson said, falling in with the game. ‘It would have been the dead man’s boss, and through him we’d have been able to crack the whole case wide open.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Blackstone agreed. He turned his attention to the iron nail. ‘They probably used a nail just like this to fix the skiff to the Golden Tulip,’ he said. ‘This one would have been the spare, in case they got clumsy and dropped the first one into the water.’

  ‘And this kind of nail is only sold in one ironmonger’s shop in the whole of London,’ Patterson said.

  Blackstone laughed. ‘Regrettably not. But maybe the card will tell us something we don’t already know. “The Austro-Hungary Club, Soho,”’ he read. ‘What’s that? Some kind of club for foreigners? A home-from-home for Central Europeans?’

  Patterson shook his head. ‘It’s got nothing to do with Austria-Hungary at all,’ he said.

  ‘Then what exactly is it?’

  ‘It’s a gambling club—a very expensive gambling club.’

  ‘How do you know so much about it?’ Blackstone wondered. ‘Had the odd flutter there yourself?’

  ‘On my pay?’ Patterson scoffed. ‘I’ve never even walked through the door. But I know a bloke who has.’

  Of course he did, Blackstone thought. Whatever the topic under discussion, Patterson always knew ‘a bloke’ who’d done it, whether the ‘it’ in question was riding a horse in the Grand National or walking barefoot half-way to the South Pole. It was Patterson’s contacts which made him invaluable to his boss—that and his unquestionable loyalty.

  ‘So what more can you tell me about this club, other than the fact that it’s expensive?’ he asked.

  ‘What more is there to say?’ Patterson asked. ‘It’s where the rich go to lose their fortunes—and the chancers go to try and win one.’

  ‘Who runs it?’

  ‘Now that I don’t know,’ Patterson admitted.

  ‘You disappoint me,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘But I have met the man who fronts for the owners,’ Patterson said quickly, in an attempt to salvage his reputation. ‘His name’s Maurice Dunn. He’s a minor aristocrat with friends in high places.’

  ‘And you’re certain he isn’t the owner?’

  ‘Positive. He’s the one who signs the hills, but I doubt he’s got the brains to run a coffee stall, let alone a gambling club.’

  ‘An
d what about our friend here?’ Blackstone asked, looking down at the corpse on the slab again. ‘Is he the sort who might be welcomed at the Austro-Hungary Club?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ Patterson pronounced cautiously. ‘He’s not badly dressed, but not exactly well dressed, either. Still, if I was planning to set fire to a Dutch sloop in the middle of the Thames, I don’t suppose I’d go about it dressed in my best bib and tucker.’

  ‘If you had one,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘If I had one,’ Patterson agreed.

  He reached out and picked up one of the dead man’s hands. He ran the index finger of his own free hand over the man’s palm, then bent closer in order to examine the fingers.

  ‘No calluses,’ the Sergeant said when he’d finished his inspection. ‘His fingernails aren’t broken, either. So I think we can say for certain that whatever he did for a living, it had nothing to do with manual labour. But that’s not the same as saying he was well-heeled enough to have been welcomed with open arms at the Austro-Hungary Club. He might be no more than a clerk—and a clerk’s weekly wage wouldn’t even cover a single minimum bet at the baccarat table.’

  ‘Maybe we’d better pay a visit to this club ourselves,’ Blackstone suggested. ‘When does it open for business?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think you’d find much activity before ten o’clock tonight,’ Patterson said. ‘And that’s at the earliest.’

  ‘Then that’s when we’ll have to drop in on it,’ Blackstone said.

  He turned round to face the uniformed constable, who was still sniffing loudly as a way of displaying his dislike of fresh fish.

  ‘Have the people at the morgue been informed that they need to pick this bloke up?’ he asked.

  The constable took one more sniff, in case his superior had missed the point. ‘Yes, sir, they have,’ he said.

  ‘Then there’s not much more that we can do here,’ Blackstone told Patterson. ‘We might as well go outside and get a breath of fresh air.’

  The constable watched the two detectives walk to the door and out into the bright autumn sunlight.