A Gentleman's Murder

by Christopher Huang

  He’d reached Pennyfields by now. It had much the same poor-but-respectable appearance as Limehouse Causeway, but the Chinese he heard was a different dialect. It was more clipped and incisive, and Eric reckoned that he might be able to get around his lack of language by pretending to be someone from the other part of Chinatown.

  The first shop he entered appeared to be a hardware store, and it was not, technically, open for business. The shopkeeper was a blue-eyed blonde of middle age, and she was instructing her teenaged half-Chinese son on how to manage the inventory.

  “Ni yao se me?” the woman asked, switching from English to Cockney-accented Chinese on seeing Eric.

  Wordlessly, Eric held up Norris’s photograph. Both the woman and her son examined it carefully, but shook their heads. Norris had not been here. Eric made a show of checking for witnesses, then said, in a low voice, “Eeshahn?”

  “Eeshahn?” the woman echoed, frowning in perplexity.

  Her son frowned, too, and then his brow cleared. He ducked behind the counter and emerged with an umbrella. “Ni yao de si ba yu san, dui ma?”

  Eric had little choice but to purchase the umbrella and leave the shop. He chucked it into a bin as soon as he decently could, then ambled on to the next store … only to emerge five minutes later with another umbrella clutched in his hands.

  Was he going to be showered with umbrellas each time he trotted out that name? That was probably what it actually meant, unless he’d mangled the intonation somehow. He’d only ever heard it third-hand from English policemen, after all.

  He was about to chuck this second unwanted umbrella and try his luck again when it suddenly dawned on him: This wasn’t just an umbrella. It was a brolly.

  Brolly’s was just as Eric remembered from his visit with Penny. It was too early in the day for business, but the custodian who answered the door let Eric in once he’d explained that he wanted to see the manager.

  Benson had been here investigating Breuleux’s involvement in the drug trade. Eric realised that now, and everything else fell into place, though he wondered just what that meant for Bradshaw. Could it be possible that Bradshaw was protecting the establishment under the impression that it was an unlicensed music hall and nothing else? Wishful thinking—Bradshaw was cannier than that. But if he were involved in the drug trade here, he must have known, long before Aldershott found out, about Norris’s problem.

  Eric made his way through the empty auditorium and into the corridor beyond. Frye, that great bruiser, was standing at the foot of the stairs at the far end of the corridor, smoking a cigarette. Eric gave him a nod, which he didn’t return, and rapped on Breuleux’s door.

  Breuleux had lost the Chinese whiskers since last they met, though the pink bow tie was still in place. He was surprised to see Eric, and said so.

  “I’ve come about that job you mentioned,” Eric said. “The room upstairs?”

  “Oh!” Breuleux looked wary. “How much has Bradshaw told you?”

  “Not a thing.” Eric thought it best to avoid elaborate lies. “He doesn’t know I’d thought to take you up on the offer.”

  Breuleux said, “But you know what it entails?”

  “I think I have a good idea that I’m the sort of man you want.” When Breuleux still hesitated, Eric added, “You’ll remember I’m as good as Frye any time of the day.”

  “You’re a bleeding toff—”

  “Even toffs fall into debt.” Eric affected a more pleading tone. “Please. I need this, even if only for a little while. I’ll be the laughing stock of St. James if I have to let my club membership go just from lack of funds, and I don’t want to just borrow it. I know where that can lead. I … also know the Chinese word for ‘umbrella.’”

  “Yu san.” Breuleux nodded, and made a decision. “All right. I daresay I need a man who can handle an unruly customer. So come along, and I’ll show you what’s what.”

  Frye stepped aside for them as Breuleux led Eric up the stairs to a dingy landing with an unremarkable set of doors. Beyond these doors, however, sweet incense billowed out at them, reminiscent of Oriental spices. It masked an undercurrent of stale sweat. The light was dim, and the air was smoky; the walls were papered in red, and everywhere Eric looked, he saw panels of elaborately carved gypsum, lacquered over to simulate rosewood. It was the heady opulence promised by the “yellow peril” thrillers, and Eric knew exactly what to expect beyond the scarlet curtains.

  “We’ll have you fitted out in a proper Chinaman costume,” Breuleux said. “Unless you’ve got one of your own? No? Well, that can wait. We shan’t have to bother with any makeup in your case. You look perfect for the part already. Almost. You’ll have to grow out your moustache: two little tendrils on either side of your mouth, just like in the pictures. Think you could do that?”

  “I think so.”

  “People don’t come here just for the opium, you know,” Breuleux said as he took hold of the scarlet curtain. “Who needs an opium den when you can smoke the stuff in the privacy of your own home? They come here for the atmosphere. They want to imagine that they really are venturing into a forbidden temptation of the Celestial court, and they want to see it run by a Celestial like you. I’ve been playing ‘Mr. Yu San’ long enough.” He rubbed his upper lip. “And I’ll be honest: gluing those whiskers on every night is a pain I’m happy to leave behind.”

  They stepped through the curtain into a chamber that was all shadows and smoke. It was lit only by a filthy skylight. Figures huddled in alcoves, and Eric heard the occasional drug-addled sigh. Here were a pair of bright young things, him in a dinner jacket and her in a flapper’s party frock, sharing an intimate pipe; and here was a tired, hollow-eyed man with an Army jacket and an attitude of despair. Most were a little better dressed than Eric had expected, but after all, vices cost money.

  Breuleux whispered, “They’re not all on opium. One or two come just to say they’ve been, and don’t actually take anything at all. But some others are on something stronger.”

  Eric whispered back, “Something stronger … you mean morphine? Cocaine?”

  “Whatever they want. They’re the serious ones, and they usually take their stuff home to consume at their own leisure. But one or two prefer to stay here.”

  Eric thought he’d find Patrick Norris here. Along with sizing up the operation itself, he’d been looking out for him, peering at the bright thrill seekers and the despairing addicts alike. The couple sharing a pipe had barely acknowledged him; the girl murmured something about how late it was getting, and her young man responded with an offer to take her home. The hollow-eyed man in the Army jacket didn’t look up. A trio of university students—rugby players, by the look of them—offered Eric a rude gesture before slumping back down against one another. An elderly man, probably not actually so elderly as he looked, lay flat on his back and appeared barely alive. Eric began to sense a pattern: the thrill seekers came in groups; the true addicts came alone.

  Norris was alone, at the back of the room. He was stretched out on a pallet, a loosened tourniquet dangling from one elbow. He was still in the same dinner clothes he’d had on at Aldershott’s dinner party, but his shirt was clammy with sweat. A rank odour clung to him, and it seemed unlikely that any amount of laundering would get it out again. He moaned and sat up when Eric prodded him, but seemed otherwise quite insensible of the world around him.

  “Mr. Norris is an old friend,” Breuleux told Eric. “I haven’t seen him in months. Then, after Thursday’s show, he suddenly appeared and demanded a bottle of his usual poison. And now here he is.”

  After Thursday’s show? Eric remembered that Norris had stepped away for a few minutes before meeting him again in the lobby to escort Penny home. Perhaps that was why Norris had suggested Brolly’s in the first place. As for Breuleux, the fellow gave no sign of having seen Eric and Norris together that night. Perhaps he simply hadn’t looked out into the auditorium.

  Eric knelt down to examine Norris more closely. His breat
hing was shallow, but regular. There was a slight bluish tinge to his lips, and the constricted pupils of his eyes registered nothing. There was no laughter in them.

  Eric said, “Has he been here all weekend?”

  “Oh yes,” Breuleux replied, unconcerned. “He’s done that once or twice before.”

  “He needs to get home.”

  “I expect he will, eventually, but—”

  “No.” Eric rounded fiercely on Breuleux. “He needs to get home now. And I’m taking him there, like it or not.”

  “Now see here—”

  But Eric had already pulled Norris to his feet. Norris gasped slightly and let out a moan that was more of a whispering sigh. “Sod off, Peterkin,” he mumbled. There was a rumbling, deep in his chest, which took Eric a few seconds to recognise as a slow, marching dirge.

  “I’m an armless, boneless, chickenless egg,

  And I’ll have to be put with a bowl out to beg,

  Oh, Penny, ye hardly knew me!”

  Eric hauled him to his feet. He wasn’t quite so far gone that he had to actually be carried, but he still had to be half supported with the aid of one arm. With his free hand, Eric brandished his walking stick at Breuleux, who stepped back in alarm.

  “Mr. Breuleux,” Eric said, “I’m giving you an option. You can help me get this man to his club—no, to a doctor—and we’ll say no more about this. Or we can do this the hard way. What will it be?”

  The shock on Breuleux’s face hardened into suspicion and fury. “You weren’t here about managing the den at all, were you? You were here for him.”

  Eric was already halfway out of the room with Norris in tow.

  “Frye!” Breuleux screamed. “Frye! Get up here!”

  Eric dragged Norris out of the opulent antechamber and onto the dingy landing. Frye was already halfway up the stairs. Eric swung around, keeping his back to the wall, so that both the stairs and the entrance to the opium den were in front of him. His grip on the handle of his walking stick tightened. The shaft detached itself and clattered to the floor, revealing a gleaming blade.

  Frye paused, then took another step up. Breuleux, white with rage, appeared at the doors.

  Eric bared his teeth at them. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, sword stick or no, you can best me because I’ve got to deal with Mr. Patrick Norris here. You’re thinking that even if I drop him, all you have to do is back off, then jump me when I go to pick him up again. Don’t count on it. If I drop Norris, I know quite well that I can’t pick him up again until I’ve dropped the both of you as well.”

  The gaze he levelled at Breuleux and Frye belonged not to a gentleman with a sword stick but to someone wielding a carbine, and the point of his blade was that of a bayonet caked in blood.

  Somewhere in the back of Eric’s mind, a beast born of mist and mud-spattered memory roared out for release.

  “Frye,” Breuleux said, fighting to keep his voice even, “go down to the street and summon a taxicab. Mr. Norris and Mr. Peterkin are leaving.”

  UNSEATED

  IT WAS CLOSE on six when Eric strode into the Britannia Club after leaving Norris in the capable hands of a medical man he knew: a Dr. Filgrave, whose father and grandfather had practiced almost on the Peterkin family doorstep, but who himself now practiced in the heart of Lambeth, on the south side of the Thames.

  Life was slowly coming back to the Britannia. From the dining room came the familiar, subdued clink of silverware, and a pair of elderly bachelors had paused to talk on the stair landing under the painting of the Arthurian Knights. The club wasn’t quite up to full strength yet, but it wasn’t so dead as it had been since the murder.

  Eric noted none of this.

  He gave Old Faithful a curt military nod as he marched by. Parker had lit a fire in his belly, and the sight of Norris at Brolly’s had fanned it to blazing. Now it carried him forwards the way it carried him through the confrontation with Breuleux, and it sharpened his focus on the present. At the same time, it drew a shade over the images of Helen Benson lying dead in the hospital morgue and Patrick Norris’s pinprick pupils. All he saw was his objective: the puppetmaster who pulled the strings, arranged the favours, and Got Things Done. Jacob Bradshaw.

  Bradshaw was in his office with a copy of the Sunday Express, open to the crossword puzzle that was to be the first of a regular feature. He had the comfortable air of the freshly fed, and a hot cup of tea sat steaming by his elbow. He looked up with some surprise as Eric marched in and kicked the door shut behind him.

  “Peterkin, what—”

  “Who are you, Bradshaw?”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Bradshaw knows people. Bradshaw Gets Things Done. Bradshaw pulls a string in Cornwall and half the bloody gentry in Northumberland jump off a bloody bridge. Too bloody right! But who are you really?”

  “I don’t care for your tone of voice, Peterkin. Now spit it out: What’s got your back up?”

  “I was at Brolly’s an hour ago. Guess who I found there? Norris. And I think you know exactly what the circumstances were.”

  Bradshaw’s brow came together in a frown. “Be quiet, Peterkin. You don’t know what you’re on about.”

  “And you do!” Eric said. “So explain it to me, Bradshaw. Norris was half dead when I found him. I think if I’d left it to tomorrow, he would be dead. But that would just go down in the papers as another ‘accidental shooting,’ wouldn’t it?”

  “Shut up, Peterkin!”

  Bradshaw was standing now. His face was red, and Eric thought the man ready to explode. Eric clenched his jaw, ready to weather the storm. But in that moment, Bradshaw’s face slackened and a sad warmth poured back into his brown eyes.

  “Peterkin,” Bradshaw said, “you know better than I do what the Great War was like. I wasn’t there, but I heard it all from the boys I’d put into uniform and shipped over. My war was the Second Boer War. The men who came home from that … some of them turned to drink, and you understood that they’d seen and done things they wanted to forget but couldn’t. But that was nothing like the trenches, was it? Did what you see match up in any way with anything your father ever told you about what to expect on the battlefield? Did it sound at all like Kipling?”

  Bradshaw stared across the desk at Eric. The conflicting emotions continued to resolve themselves into an expression of sorrow and regret.

  “I made him,” the man who Got Things Done said. “I trained him and I taught him to hold a rifle and then I sent him out there. You’re responsible for the things you make, Peterkin, and I made him—like a toymaker painting a set of toy soldiers, hoping against hope that they’re sturdy enough to withstand a bit of punishment, that they don’t get crushed underfoot or left out in the rain to rust. You find a broken soldier, and your heart breaks along with it.”

  “So you set him up to kill himself on morphine?”

  “I kept him alive! You can’t take all the rust off a toy soldier, but you can clean it up and paint it over, and you can set it aside where it’ll be safe, and you can give it the special care it needs. As a boy, you’d only ever played at toy soldiers; you don’t know what it is to make one, to build something up and see it destroyed in ways you never thought possible.”

  It was a frightening image: Father Christmas in his workshop, churning out toy soldiers for Flanders. What child reenact Ypres or Verdun with toy soldiers? Eric imagined a shell landing among the tidy formations of his childhood, and the gaily painted red-coated figures scattering in broken shards.

  Bradshaw said, “I set Norris up with Breuleux because I know Breuleux and Breuleux knows me. Norris was still alive when you found him, wasn’t he? Breuleux knows to take care of my men, and I depend on him for that. If a man’s going to lose himself in a vice, better he do it where I can keep an eye on him.”

  The effort of explanation seemed to have drained Bradshaw of all energy. The old man dropped back into his chair, and Eric dared to venture forward. Age had put gr
ey rings around the brown eyes looking back at Eric; they looked alien, as though Bradshaw had pupils within his pupils.

  “The world was a different place when I was your age, Peterkin. Mustard gas! Chlorine! That’s not how things used to work. This wasn’t the war I set those boys up for.” Bradshaw looked at Eric, and for the first time, Eric saw—not Father Christmas, not a stern drill sergeant, and not even an ancient reptile—just a tired old man. The white beard trembled, and a voice behind it whispered, “I just didn’t want to see another old boy swinging from a rope or bleeding out over a pavement.”

  No. Nobody did. But Eric remembered the squalid mattress where he’d found Norris, and the rank odour of two-day-old sweat. He thought of the bright-eyed laughter dying behind the stultifying haze of morphine. He thought of his own men. The rage blazed up again.

  “That is not how you handle an ex-serviceman’s distress! Wrap them up in comforting vice? You’d given up on them!”

  Bradshaw’s eyes narrowed dangerously as his fury returned. “Peterkin—”

  “You didn’t ‘set them aside’; you decided they were worthless and turned your back on them!”

  “Peterkin!”

  “And it’s clear Norris wasn’t the only one you ruined—”

  “Lieutenant!”

  Bradshaw had leapt to his feet. It was his turn to raise his voice, and he raised it in true drill sergeant fashion. It rang out like a gunshot and rattled the window. A porcelain tortoise, displaced by the excitement, finally fell off the edge and shattered on the floor. Eric, like countless soldiers before him, started back in silence.

  “Bloody subalterns,” Bradshaw growled. “You get a pip on your shoulder and you think you know everything. I’ve been doing this since before you were born. Don’t you dare question my decisions.”

  “Aldershott cured Norris.”

  “He doesn’t sound cured to me.”

  “No thanks to you! He’d have been fine, but you abandoned him to the likes of Breuleux, and look what happened!”