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

by Sally Spencer

  ‘Well, yes, I’m almost sure he is.’

  ‘Good,’ Patterson said. ‘Then he was probably the thief, which means that he came in with my friend, so you’ve nothing more to worry about.’

  The waiter breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank you, Sergeant.’

  Patterson drained his lemonade glass. ‘We appear to need some more drinks,’ he said.

  ‘Of course, Sergeant,’ the waiter said gushingly. ‘Another gin, and another lemonade?’

  ‘Another gin, certainly,’ Patterson agreed. ‘But I rather think I’ll have a whisky this time.’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant. Right away.’

  ‘And make it your good whisky, mind.’

  ‘But of course. We only serve—’

  ‘I don’t want any of your normal rot-gut. Mine’s to be poured from the bottle you keep hidden away at the back of the top shelf for your special customers. Understood?’

  ‘Understood,’ the waiter agreed, scurrying away.

  Van Diemen’s shoulders had slumped. ‘I’m in trouble, aren’t I?’ he asked miserably.

  ‘That depends,’ Patterson said.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On whether you actively assisted with the arson attack on your own ship…’

  ‘I swear I didn’t.’

  ‘…or were doing no more than trying to make a little bit of money on the side.’

  ‘And if it is the second thing?’

  ‘We’re not interested in your little fiddles. Good God, man, we’re trying to catch a dangerous arsonist!’

  ‘Then it is the second thing,’ the Dutchman confessed.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘The man came up to me while I was having a drink and—’

  ‘The man in the picture?’

  The Dutchman studied the sketch. ‘Yes, that is him. He said that the owners of my ship would never notice if a little of the cargo went missing, and he had it all set up with some costermongers he knew to quickly get rid of the eels. It seemed a very good plan.’

  ‘He was the only man you saw?’ Patterson asked. ‘He didn’t have anyone else with him?’

  ‘No, he was alone.’

  ‘And how much did he offer you?’

  ‘Two pounds.’

  A good figure to choose, Patterson thought. Enough to get the captain interested, but not enough to make him suspicious.

  ‘What else can you tell me about this man?’ he asked.

  ‘He looked exactly as he does in the sketch.’

  Patterson sighed heavily. ‘If you’re to be let off the hook, you have to tell me more than that,’ he said.

  ‘The…the man did not talk with a London accent.’

  ‘You’re saying he was a foreigner?’

  ‘No, I…I think he was from the north of your country—or, more likely—from Scotland.’

  ‘How would you recognise a Scottish accent?’

  ‘I have sometimes sailed to Scotland with my cargo.’

  Patterson nodded. ‘So we’ll assume he’s probably Scottish,’ he said. ‘Now this Scot told you that he and his accomplice would row out to your boat at two o’clock in the morning, did he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that is exactly what they did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we now know that they didn’t want to buy eels from you at all. That their plan was to set your sloop on fire.’

  ‘I know,’ van Diemen moaned. ‘But I swear to you on my mother’s grave that I had no idea—’

  ‘So why did they need you at all?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You were a necessary part of the plan if they were going to steal some of your cargo. But if all they wanted to do was set fire to your sloop, what did they need you for? Wouldn’t it have been better, from their point of view, if there’d been no witnesses?’

  ‘Yes,’ van Diemen said. ‘Yes, I suppose it would.’

  ‘So why go to the trouble—and the risk—of contacting you at all? What did they hope to gain from it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ van Diemen said helplessly.

  And neither do I, Patterson thought.

  13

  Blackstone stood in the open doorway, and looked in on the morgue of the University College Hospital. It was bigger than the police morgue, he thought, but other than that it was pretty much the same. It, too, had white tiled walls, It, too, had sinks, dissection tables and refrigeration drawers for the cadavers. And it, too—unfortunately—stank of formaldehyde and other obnoxious chemicals the Inspector didn’t even know the names of.

  On the other hand, the doctor—who at that moment was bending over a corpse which Blackstone recognised as his—appeared to be as different from the police doctor as chalk is from cheese.

  Dr Donaldson was a powerful man who looked capable of taking a corpse apart with only his bare hands, though perhaps—with a particularly tough body—he’d also have to resort to using his teeth. This bloke was so slight it seemed as if he’d have trouble lifting a surgical saw, let alone cutting through a diaphragm with it. Still there was no doubting his enthusiasm—he couldn’t have had the corpse in his possession for more than a few minutes, and already he was hard at work on it.

  Blackstone knocked lightly on the door, then stepped into the room. The doctor, still absorbed by his work, did not even look up.

  ‘Excuse me!’ the Inspector said.

  The doctor continued to ignore him.

  Why did doctors always behave as if the normal rules of polite society didn’t apply to them? Blackstone wondered.

  Who gave them the right to act as if they were God Almighty?

  We do, he thought answering his own question. We don’t talk to them as if they were normal people at all. There’s always a deference in our voices—whether we intend it or not.

  ‘I’m Inspector Blackstone from Scotland Yard,’ he said, louder and more authoritatively this time. ‘I’m here to see if you’ve got any questions that you’d like to ask me about the body.’

  The figure bent over the corpse turned round to face him, and Blackstone’s jaw dropped in surprise.

  ‘You’re not Dr Carr!’ he said accusingly.

  The woman, who was a brunette, about five feet one inch tall, and seemed to be in her middle-to-late twenties, smiled at him.

  ‘I said you’re not Dr Carr,’ Blackstone repeated.

  ‘Ain’t I?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Well, no,’ Blackstone said, wondering—briefly—where his earlier resolution had gone.

  The woman laughed. ‘Course I ain’t Dr Carr,’ she said. “Ow the bloody ‘ell could I be? Dr Carr’s a bloke, ain’t ‘e?’ She pulled her smock down deliberately, so that it clung to her small, well-rounded breasts. ‘An’ in case you ‘aven’t noticed, I definitely ain’t.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Blackstone admitted, running his eyes—involuntarily—up and down her slim shapely body.

  ‘Seen enough?’ the woman asked.

  Not really, Blackstone thought. Nowhere near enough. But aloud, he contented himself with saying, ‘So who are you, and what are you are doing with my body?’

  ‘Your body?’ the woman said. ‘I thought you was wearin’ your body.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Blackstone said crossly.

  ‘Suppose I do,’ the woman admitted. ‘Well, I’m the cleaner, ain’t I?’

  Of course she was, Blackstone thought. Her accent was clearly East End. What else could she be but a cleaner?

  ‘Fing is,’ the woman continued, ‘the doctor doesn’t like to get ‘is hands dirty, so I fort I’d spruce this poor bloke up a bit before ‘e gets to see ‘im.’

  ‘You thought you’d do what?’ Blackstone asked, outraged.

  ‘Spruce ‘im up. ‘E’s been in the river, you see, an’ e’s covered in filth. So I fort I’d give ‘im a good scrubbin’.’

  ‘A good scrubbing?’ Blackstone repeated.

  ‘Yeah, a touch of the old rub-a-dub-dub. An’ just to ma
ke ‘im look tidy, I pulled that bit of old iron out of ‘is chest an’ frew it away.’

  ‘But that was—’ Blackstone began.

  ‘Evidence?’ the woman interrupted him. ‘A vital part of the forensic pathology.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Blackstone agreed, ‘but how did you . .?’

  But he’d already guessed the answer, because as the woman stepped aside he could see that, despite what she’d just said, there was no evidence of a scrubbing brush, and the ‘bit of old iron’ she claimed to have thrown out was still clearly embedded in the corpse’s chest.

  ‘You’re…you’re Dr Carr,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right, me ole cock sparrer,’ the woman confirmed.

  Blackstone found that he was suddenly—and, he recognised, unreasonably—angry. ‘Well, if you really are Dr Carr, why don’t you drop that phoney accent?’ he demanded.

  ‘There’s nuffink phoney about this accent. Oh, I can talk posh enough when I ‘ave to,’ the woman—Dr Carr—said. ‘When, for example, I’m meeting with my colleagues from the Royal College of Surgeons, I speak like this. But don’t make no mistake about it, Inspector Blackstone,’ she continued, reverting to her East End patois, ‘this is the real me—little Ellie Carr from the Whitechapel Road.’

  ‘But you really are a doctor?’ Blackstone asked, still not quite able to come to terms with the situation.

  ‘That’s right,’ the woman said. ‘An’ a very clever doctor, to boot, don’t you think? Because you ‘ave to be extra smart to travel from where I’ve come from to where I am now.’

  ‘So why pretend to be a cleaner?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘You was the one wot told me I wasn’t a doctor,’ the woman reminded him. ‘And you was the one wot seemed more than willin’ to accept I was nuffink but a drudge.’

  Blackstone lowered his head in what was—undoubtedly—shame, then lifted it and said, ‘Shall we start again?’

  Dr Carr smiled. ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘You seem like you might be a reasonable sort of bloke, once you’ve pushed your preconceptions and prejudices to one side.’

  Some sort of enlightenment was beginning to dawn, and Blackstone grinned. ‘Do you make everybody you meet for the first time jump through the same hoops you’ve just made me jump through?’ he asked.

  The doctor returned the grin. ‘Pretty much,’ she admitted. ‘After that first meeting they never dare to patronise me again.’

  Blackstone offered Dr Carr a cigarette and took one himself. ‘It might have helped avoid embarrassment if Dr Donaldson had told me you were a woman,’ he said, as he lit both cigarettes up.

  ‘It might,’ Ellie Carr agreed. ‘But Clive Donaldson was probably afraid that if he told you the truth, you’d have kicked up a fuss about me getting my hands on the stiff. And can you honestly say that wouldn’t have?’

  ‘So he omitted to tell the whole truth for the best of motives,’ Blackstone said, avoiding the question. ‘He did it because he really thought you could contribute something significant to my investigation.’

  ‘The reason Clive lied was because he knew I’d be delighted to get my hands on the cadaver,’ Dr Carr said. ‘It would be like sending a bunch of flowers to another woman.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m quite following you,’ Blackstone admitted.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Ellie Carr. ‘It’s perfectly simple.’

  ‘Then perhaps you could expl—’

  ‘Clive’s great ambition is to get inside my knickers, and his working theory is that the more he does things to please me, the better the chances of me letting him have his way.’

  ‘I see,’ Blackstone said, slightly worriedly.

  ‘But even allowing for Clive’s ignoble motives, things have worked out for the best,’ Dr Carr continued. ‘Because the simple fact of the matter is that you couldn’t have anyone better examining your cadaver than me.’

  ‘You’re a little short on modesty,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘I have little to be modest about,’ the doctor retorted.

  ‘So what can you tell me about my stiff?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘He’s dead,’ the doctor replied.

  ‘But what killed him?’

  ‘The short answer is that he stopped breathing.’

  ‘And what’s the long one?’

  ‘The long one will take some time,’ the doctor said. ‘That’s what “long” means.’

  ‘Dr Donaldson said he was almost certain it was the chunk of metal which did it.’

  ‘Dr Donaldson is paid per body. So the more of them he gets through, the better off he is. Accuracy’s not particularly important to him. Why should it be? The dead can’t contradict him, and the quick—who have the greatest respect for a medical man—see no reason to. I, on the other hand, am a research scientist.’

  ‘And that makes a difference, does it?’

  ‘A world of difference. If I can’t tell you more about your body than Clive Donaldson could have done if he’d devoted a lifetime to it, then I’ll give up dissecting cadavers for a living, and take a job cutting up cloth in a sweat shop in Whitechapel—which is what all the people in my old neighbourhood thought I’d end up doing anyway.’

  ‘So you’re saying Donaldson’s wrong about the wound from the piece of metal killing him?’

  ‘No, I’m not saying that at all. What I’m actually saying is I don’t know what killed him. Yet.’

  ‘And when do you think you will know?’

  Dr Carr took a deep drag on her cigarette. ‘It’s very hard to tell in these cases. But rest assured, Inspector Blackstone, when I have got something to report, you’ll be the first one I’ll report it to.’

  She was a formidable woman, Blackstone thought, and he could have stayed talking to her for ever. The problem was, he couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t end up making him look foolish.

  He hesitated for a few seconds more, then tipped his hat in her general direction. ‘I’ll bid you good morning and leave you to your work, then, Dr Carr,’ he said.

  Ellie Carr, too, hesitated for a moment. Then she gave him a mock curtsey. ‘Gawd bless yer, sir,’ she said. ‘Gawd bless yer for makin’ the time to come an’ see a poor woman like me.’

  14

  A late spring evening fog descended on Soho. It was cold, clammy—and all-pervasive. It shrouded the coughing, hacking prostitutes, who were waiting—always hopeful and desperate—on street corners. It offered both ambush-cover and an escape route for the pickpockets and purse snatchers who swarmed on to the street in the wake of its arrival. It swirled and thickened, turning even the most innocent passer-by into a dark and sinister figure. And if the firebug was planning a third attack, Blackstone thought as he approached the door of the Austro-Hungary Club, he probably couldn’t have asked for a better night for it.

  The door to the club was a solid one—undoubtedly solid enough to defy a police battering ram just long enough for those on the other side of it to get rid of any incriminating evidence. There was a sliding grille at eye level, and, as Blackstone had expected, it slid open when he rapped on the door with his cane.

  ‘What do you want?’ a voice on the other side of the door demanded aggressively.

  ‘A little entertainment,’ Blackstone replied.

  ‘What kind of entertainment?’

  ‘What kind have you got on offer?’

  There was a slight pause, then the doorman said, ‘You’re not from the police, are you?’

  ‘Do I look as if I’m from the police?’ Blackstone countered.

  He certainly shouldn’t, he told himself. The evening suit he was wearing had been the best that Moss Bros. of Covent Garden had for hire, and his cane—so the manager had informed him—was tipped with solid silver.

  ‘This is a members only club,’ the doorman informed him.

  ‘Then make me a member,’ Blackstone suggested.

  ‘It’ll cost you a quid,’ the doorman pointed out.

  Blackston
e reached into his inside pocket, and produced a thick wad of bank notes.

  ‘Do you think that will bother me particularly?’ he asked airily, waving the wad in front of the grille.

  There was another pause, followed by the sound of bolts being drawn. The door swung open, and the doorman said, ‘Inside! Quick!’

  Blackstone stepped through the gap, and the doorman immediately slammed the door closed behind him. He was standing in a foyer, expensively carpeted, but furnished with only a table and two chairs. A corridor ran off the foyer, and down that corridor drifted the sounds of loud laughter and even louder piano music.

  The doorman—who was a professional brute if Blackstone had ever seen one—gave the new arrival a quick, though thorough, inspection.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ he demanded.

  ‘What do you mean exactly?’ Blackstone asked lazily. ‘Where have I come from tonight? Or where have I come from previously?’

  ‘Both,’ the doorman said.

  ‘Tonight I’ve come from the Ritz, where I have engaged a suite for a fortnight,’ Blackstone told him. ‘Previously, I came from the Dominion of Canada, which is where I happen to live.’

  ‘You don’t sound like a toff,’ the doorman complained.

  ‘I’m not,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘But I am very rich, and I’ve found that’s usually as useful a key as good breeding when it comes to gaining entry into most social circles.’

  The doorman thought for a moment. ‘Wait here,’ he said, before disappearing down the corridor.

  He returned with two new men. One was around fifty, very solid, and with a ruddy face which could have been the result of a healthy outdoor life—or might have been brought on by a wholly unhealthy excess of booze. The second man was younger, leaner, and had dark calculating eyes.

  ‘The commissionaire tells me that you wish to become a member of this club,’ the florid man said.

  He was a foreigner from his accent, Blackstone decided. Perhaps Dutch. Or perhaps German.

  ‘I don’t particularly want to join, no,’ Blackstone replied.

  ‘But he said—’

  ‘I wish to gamble,’ the Inspector interrupted. ‘But if, in order to do that, I must join your club, then I certainly have no objections.’