The Humbug Murders

by L. J. Oliver

  She could tell I’d seen through her disguise. Her eyes rolled, she got up, stuffed her hands in her pockets, and shuffled over to me, kicking pebbles.

  “What by God’s name are you doing here?” I hissed, grabbing her arms and giving her the slightest shake. She was unfazed.

  “Looking for the prostitute of course!” she said. I released her, and she brushed off the enormous blue man’s jacket she must have acquired from some charity shop.

  “Of course,” answered Dickens, still scribbling in that dratted notebook. “Makes perfect sense! She thought we were only interested in Smithson and would let the Annie Piper lead falter, so she came here to do something about it herself.”

  “Can you conceive of how dangerous your behavior is?” I asked. “That Shelley woman has put mad and dangerous ideas in your head.”

  “Don’t be so soft,” she trilled. “Women and children own these streets. Look around you! You’re in the minority here, Scrooge. Ah, Mr. Dickens! I do beg your pardon, how very lovely to see you again. How do you do, sir?”

  “Very well, thank you,” answered my companion, removing a newly lit cigarette from his mouth just long enough to kiss her hand.

  “You don’t belong here,” I interrupted. I spun Adelaide around so she was facing the square. Prostitutes cackled some way away. Vile hawkers pimped their disgusting services. A door opened, spilling light and music into the square, and a drunkard was thrown out, landing on his back with a sickening crunch. “These are not savory people.”

  But Adelaide turned back to me, her beautiful green eyes flaming under a tightly knotted brow. “I don’t think you can know much about what is savory and what’s not, Scrooge,” she chided. “I have seen the world from both extremes; you will not educate me.”

  “Enough! You will leave this place immediately, or—”

  “Or what?” came a voice, thin and chilling. I turned.

  Before me stood an enraged man well past the prime of his years but not yet decrepit. His little eyes flashed and darted between me, Dickens, and Adelaide. His matted hair, of which there was a vast quantity, was as red as his pointed beard, and poking out from under his flat hat. His mouth was twisted into a villainous sneer.

  The boys had all returned, but they were standing some way away, some of them sporting bloody noses and swollen lips. Dodger stood directly behind the man, a welt spreading across his eye and cheek.

  “Is this gentleman bothering you, my dear?” the man asked. He unbuckled his belt, stripped it out of his trousers with a flourish, and wrapped it around his hand. “Bothering a nice young lad who might want to learn about the opportunities offered in joining my enterprise?” Adelaide’s disguise had fooled him.

  “That’s gonna earn someone a batty-fang, it is!” He cracked the belt against the cold cobbles to underline his promise of a thorough thrashing. It rang out a sickening thwack and sprayed slush on my trousers. Adelaide backed away from him until she was pressed up against me. I could feel her warmth despite the chill. With one arm I swept her behind me and stepped forward. The man was grinning wildly.

  “Easy now, Fagin,” muttered Dodger. “Don’t go gettin’ yourself tangled up in noffin’ serious, now. We needs you, Fagin. We needs our leader, can’t have you taken off for the ’ang.”

  Fagin spun around and clocked Dodger in the face with the back of his hand, then immediately turned to face us again.

  “Enough from you, Dodger, my dear,” he said with a smirk, his eyes studying mine. “Giving strangers a tour of our world, telling our secrets, all without asking your master first. What if this man is a copper? Are you a copper, sir?”

  Just as Fagin raised his arm above his head, Dodger reached up, grabbing the other end of the belt and yanking it. The man lost his balance, lost his belt. Quick as a flash, Dodger whipped the belt through the air like a lasso, and I caught the buckle end of it.

  “Enough,” I said, yanking the belt from the lad. I tossed it away. “You’ve saved Mr. Fagin here from making a terrible blunder. If he’s wise, he’ll thank you.”

  “Thank him for what?” Fagin demanded.

  “Wotcher, Fagin,” said Dodger. “These gentlemen are ever so wealfy! We’ve just been offering a service, just like you taught us, Fagin. Nuffin’ more.”

  “Is that so?” said Fagin, his face twisting into a sickly grin. He climbed to his feet. “Well, then that changes the situation! That’s a fine thing, a good thing, it’s what we’re here for, yes, we provide services. And coppers, no, they are not so quick to part with coin, not at all, so these ’uns, they’re in the clear. But mind now, gentlemen, my dears, you had better be safe!” He put his hands together in prayer, like he was begging us, and his face was set in a sniveling humility that divulged no substance. “Pay my boys handsomely for their fine service, but pray, don’t ask questions now. Don’t ask about no Smithson, and you can have any girl you want, any at all.”

  “Splendid!” shouted Dickens, and slapped the old man amicably on the back. “We want Annie Piper. I’ll have my assistant here pay your men presently. Well? Pay them!”

  I did not share Dickens’ sense of humor, so I shot him a glare as I grabbed practically the last coins in my purse and chucked them into the slush. Fagin and the boys dropped to their knees and started gathering up the cold money, not in the slightest ashamed.

  “Oh, thankee, sir, thankee, yes, very good,” groveled Fagin, still on his knees. “Any girl at all, except that one. Any at all!”

  “We want Annie Piper,” continued Dickens. “Only she will do.”

  “Right, yes,” said Fagin, scratching his beard. “There would be considerable cost, my dears, quite a high price . . .”

  “No obstacle. Arrange an audience with Piper, and my assistant here will pay you beyond anything imagined in your most colorful midnight trances.”

  “Lovely to hear, my dears, lovely to hear. I’ll see about it, sir, you have my word.” Fagin scrambled to his feet.

  “How do we find you?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, no need for that, good sir. I’ll send a boy when Annie is ready for you, we provide services, you see. Yes, we know your faces, no worry at all, we’ll find you.” He turned to his boys. “Well? Off with you, my dears! Off and don’t come back till your pockets are filled with treasures! Jewels, rings, coins, and brooches, go and find them, my good boys!”

  The boys scattered to chimneys and open windows in all directions. As the Dodger vanished up an alleyway, he turned and gave me the slightest wink.

  Fagin was about to leave when he eyed Adelaide once more. With a grunt, he reached out to fasten his claw-like hand on her arm. “With me, my dear. I will show you the way of things!”

  Before I might even react, she ducked low, kicked Fagin in the shins, and ran for it. Her scarf billowed behind her as she darted down an alley, peals of laughter echoing in her wake.

  I tossed a final coin on the groaning Fagin, who was now lying on his side in the snow, clutching at himself.

  “For your trouble,” I said.

  Through gritted teeth he smiled—and thanked me.

  “I almost admire his tenacity and focus,” I reported to Dickens as he walked briskly from the Quarter. “A man of business, through and through.”

  “The business of misery,” Dickens said darkly. “See that you never fall so far, Scrooge.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll be waiting for you. And your story shall flow from my pen in such a way it will live on for centuries after you are dust—and your very name will become synonymous with tight-fisted greed and a lack of compassion for your fellow man.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Wednesday, December 21st, 1833

  Four Days to Christmas

  I WOKE THE next morning with a start. Someone stood by my window, a silhouetted man peering out at the street.

  Roger Colley, surely!

  Grabbing up my cane from beside my bed, I sprang at him—

  And froze as Dickens turned
from the window and lit a thinly rolled cigarette. “What are you going to do with that?” Dickens asked, snatching my cane from me with his free hand. “Get dressed. We have an appointment, you and I.”

  “Shall we have breakfast first?” I asked, turning away, my cheeks hot from embarrassment. I didn’t even ask how Dickens had gained access to my rooms. Surely, all it took was a smile and a kind word to Mrs. Doors.

  “No, Mr. Scrooge,” said the reporter. “I strongly suggest that, considering where we are bound, the less either of us has in our stomachs, the better.”

  Grunting with effort, I raced to keep up with Dickens’ ridiculously long strides as we were guided through a damp, water-logged tunnel just off the docks. The raggedy man before us held his amber lantern high and grinned back. He had more scabs and sores on his leathery, weather-worn face than teeth in his head. His ancient clothing was a patchwork quilt of repairs.

  “Who’s this, then, Mr. Dickens?” he asked in a voice thick with a Scottish accent. “Cannae recall seeing this fine young man here in the deep dark boggin’ ’afore.”

  “Nor will you again,” I vowed. “Dickens, what is this place?”

  “You’ll see,” the reporter said grimly.

  “Aye, ye will!” cried the raggedy man. “Then ye’ll wish ye had not!”

  The tunnels leading from the docks had twisted many times, leaving any trace of bright sunlight behind. Amber light flickered in the shattered puddles at our feet. The familiar stench of the Thames rose, and I clamped my handkerchief over my face to save myself from catching the diseases suspended in the putrid air.

  “These tunnels don’t flood, do they?” I asked.

  The raggedy man shrugged. Dickens strode on purposefully.

  “Dickens,” I said, “whatever’s eating you must be suffering horribly!”

  An echo of voices drifted from the next turn. We made it and a high cavern rose about us, a vault-like grotto with smaller tunnels of moist limestone creeping out in all directions like the bony, twig-like legs of a spider. A desk sat just ahead, manned by a thin-lipped police officer. A woman’s horrible, grievous wailing assaulted us from one of the tunnels beyond.

  “This the one?” the officer asked Dickens.

  He nodded.

  “This way. Keep that silk over your face,” the officer said, nodding my way. “The smell doesn’t get any better the deeper you go. That I promise you.”

  The raggedy man stepped back and began to inspect notices nailed to the walls. More of the missing women.

  I followed Dickens down a narrow tunnel. As promised, a horrid smell rushed out at us. I coughed, spun, but Dickens grabbed my arm and dragged me through the dank and narrow passage. The distant wails of a woman in grief, punctuated by hollow drips echoing off the walls above and beyond, became a ghostly symphony of dread. Soon we found ourselves in a wide circular chamber lit by torches. Stone slabs divided the dark space into aisles.

  Bodies covered in white cloths waited on at least half the slabs. Some full grown; others not.

  “Why are we here?” I demanded, my voice muffled through the handkerchief.

  “To make a point,” Dickens said grimly. “That actions have consequences.”

  “That is the cornerstone of my business.” I trembled at the sight of the feet and hands protruding out from under the white shrouds. Porcelain pale flesh, with green and blue veins. Bites taken out of many of them: some larger and more egregious than others.

  “You wanted to find Irene and her friend, Miss Annie Piper,” Dickens said. “We rushed unprepared into a place we knew next to nothing about, into the Quarter, and in our arrogance . . .”

  I looked down at a pair of slabs where the shrouded corpses of two women waited. A shock of ginger hair poked out from the closest. I jumped back and accidentally brushed the hand of another corpse. Cold as ice. Impossible to believe it had ever been animate. Had that Miss Shelley visited a place like this when writing her Modern Prometheus? Though I would admit it to no one, I much admired the novel.

  Dickens whipped the covering back—and I peered down at the naked form of a much older woman whose black and crusty innards had been chewed upon by something in the river’s deepest murk.

  “Cover her up! Cover it!” I demanded, holding back my most sincere urge to vomit, though I had nothing but a spot of tea in me.

  Startled, the anger I’d seen in Dickens’ eyes faded and he did as he was bid. He looked at the face of the other woman on the adjoining slab, then went round the room checking each body. He recoiled at a particularly disfigured brute. Half the man’s face had been eaten away. Or had it?

  “Did a fire do that?” Dickens asked, absently. “Or was he attacked with a knife? Old wounds, not new . . .” He shuddered and covered the body up. “It doesn’t matter. They’re not here,” he said with relief. “Irene and Annie are not here. Oh, Ebenezer, I thought our inquiries had led to these poor women’s deaths. But they are not here!”

  “Then let’s follow their example and be gone from this place as well!”

  “One day, I shall use my pen to pull back the coverings off all this poverty and degradation for all of London to see,” Dickens said with determination.

  “No one will thank you for revealing this ugliness.”

  Dickens grabbed my arm and pointed at all the slabs of concealed corpses. “Do you think that the Humbug Killer is the only murderer in this city who walks free?”

  I tried to shake free of his grasp, but the young reporter was stronger than he appeared.

  “I’m not interested in just stopping one murderer or reporting on one injustice,” said Dickens, still holding my arm. “I shall bring the light of truth to all the ugliness of this ‘civilized’ society—I will show all the ignorance and want that remains hidden behind our robes of prosperity.”

  “You’re a fool,” I said as I finally pulled myself free from his grip.

  “Be careful, Mr. Scrooge, I could easily sketch you as such a villain that parents would tell stories about you to scare their children into being good at this festive season.”

  It did amuse me, the thought of children being afraid of me every yuletide season. At least it might keep the little brats from caroling outside my door every December. We marched back into the “fresh” air of London without another word passing between us.

  Above, in the clean, fresh warming light of early morning, we walked together along the docks. Silence had passed between us long enough, so at last I said, “That is where the police take the bodies dragged from the river?”

  “Limestone, I believe,” he said, commenting on the cold, yellow tunnels we had left behind and their sour-milk smell. “Keeps them fresher longer.”

  “How very educational, Mr. Dickens. Are you having second thoughts about our arrangement?”

  “I was,” he admitted, “but seeing the glassy eyes of so many who have come to such a grim and sorry fate . . . No, if that note you received spoke true, Fezziwig was just the first. I would spare others the fate we just glimpsed. Present company included. I say only that we must be careful moving forward. Agreed?”

  “Absolutely. Now, have your inquiries borne any other fruit?”

  They had, it turned out. Though we had not yet heard from Fagin’s boys about an engagement with Annie Piper, and Miss Nellie Pearl had been “too busy” to be interviewed by Mr. Dickens, those who worked in more menial positions at the theatre were happy to oblige. He spoke with some who had been at the place for decades, and from them he had gleaned the connection between Nellie and Fezziwig.

  “Young Nellie had worked for Fezziwig as a spinner upstairs in the very room where he met his horrible fate,” Dickens revealed. “She had often told him how much she adored the theatre. They went together many times, she said. He introduced her to the director at Garrick Theatre in Whitechapel, and she worked her way up to the Adelphi from there. She owed her career to Fezziwig, you know. So when he sent for her, she came. And unchaperoned, I might add, through
this heaving cesspool of a London borough!”

  I thought of the actress. A pretty thing. Soft, pink lips wobbling slightly, she’d been struggling to control her shock. Yet I had registered something else, too. A nervousness, something unsettling about the way she kept tapping her foot. She was hiding something, of course. They all were.

  “Clearly, Fezziwig stumbled on to information concerning Sunderland and Rutledge,” I ventured. “Shen and Miss Pearl, too, I would imagine, considering they were all summoned to meet him at the same time and place. The question is, what? I will never believe that my friend would stoop to base blackmail to line his pockets. Yet his offices were ransacked. No one seemed to know precisely what Mr. Fezziwig was involved in at the time of his death. It’s all very puzzling.”

  Dickens lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. I steadied it for him, until it crackled into flame. “What about this ‘Chimera,’ whatever that is?” he said, exhaling with a relieved sigh. “That word put the fear of the almighty in the Colleys, and Roger and Jack clearly had some tie to Sunderland. And Jack is within our reach, at least for questioning.”

  “I doubt that Jack would say much,” I told Dickens. “And there is that matter of actions having consequences. I would do nothing to have the Colleys think of me further. I regret mentioning their names last night when we spoke with those boys.”

  “Understood. The threat to Belle Potterage. Yes, yes, agreed.”

  “I have matters underway to press Rutledge for answers. Tonight, in fact, I should have my chance. For now, though, what of Shen?” I asked. “Clearly he has some fixation on Miss Pearl.”

  “Yes, he’s often seen at the theatre. He is one of her most ardent admirers, though it is plain that she does not reciprocate his feelings.”

  “He frequents the Royal Quarter, he pays for the services of a whore who could be Nellie’s twin. We need information about the whereabouts of a certain other whore, and the man who runs that place—”