The Humbug Murders

by L. J. Oliver

  “Well . . . if you’re sure?”

  “It’s why I’m here. The only reason, I assure you.”

  Fagin pocketed the gold and backed into a doorway framed by a crimson curtain. It parted as he disappeared within it, offering only the slightest glimpse of the corridor beyond. A golden corridor, marked with rooms stamped with elegantly drawn numbers.

  Someone brushed against me and I tensed, then found myself staring into the face of Nellie Pearl!

  No, not Miss Pearl. Her doppelganger. The one with the scar who had been escorting that devil Shen the other night.

  “I’m one of the most popular dolls,” she promised with sensuous, half-closed eyes. She brushed up against me, performing a sultry dance with very distinctive, sinuous moves. I considered pressing her for what she might know about the Chinaman, then thought better of it. I didn’t want to see her end up on one of those slabs where the poor wretches whose bodies were fished from the Thames were displayed.

  I dismissed her as politely as I could manage, but her gaze flickered to her modest cleavage and she assured me that I wouldn’t soon forget her.

  Someone tapped my shoulder from behind.

  A lumbering brute stood before me, his hands stuffed in the pockets of a black velveteen coat. His filthy trousers were stuffed into grey stockings that had been pulled up over powerful calves. He stared at me, his face expressionless and his eyes deep and dark. In a rough, raspy voice he mumbled, “You’re for Miss Piper, yeah? This way, sir.”

  He led me through the crimson veil and down the golden corridor. Muffled gasps, moans, and cries of pleasure or pain, I knew not which, burst from behind the doors bracing me. At the end of the corridor, he yanked open a door to a red bedroom where a couple writhed and ground together.

  “Out!” he commanded, surging into the room and yanking the screeching woman from her paid companion. She was yet another Nellie! “Finish him elsewhere, ye slag!”

  The man peered in shock at my guide, then skittered away, gathering up his clothes and racing bare-arsed from the room, inches behind the girl.

  A four-poster bed rose in the center of the chamber, and to the side, a small table with a lamp and a pair of seats. He gestured at one and I sat, noticing an adjoining door at my side. An escape route, perhaps? My uneasiness was growing by the second.

  “Hear you’ve been asking questions,” he said, his face still stony. “Lookin’ for an audience with our good Mr. Smithson hisself. Well, I’m here to tell you—rejoice! Your long difficult journey is at an end.”

  “You mean to say . . . you’re Smithson?”

  “I go by many names,” said the man with his raspy voice, the pungent fumes of beer heavy on his breath. “You like to think of me as Smithson, well, then, that’s right, that’s fine, that’s fair as fair can be. Mind you, and count yourself privileged as I usually don’t reveal this unless I’m about to slit a man’s throat, my real name’s Bill Sikes.”

  A rat raced by, hugging the floorboard. His hand shot out with surprising speed and he caught the vermin, his meaty fingers curled about its bloated belly. “Day in, day out, it’s the rats this, the rats that. They frighten the girlies. They disgust the fine gentlemen. Myself, I quite appreciate the rats, sir. They teach us things, they do: How to hunt them. Lay traps for them . . .” The vermin squealed as the man’s fingers closed even tighter and brittle bones crackled. It fell limp. “Lots of good things, they teach us how to do.”

  His meaning was clear. I was the rat and he the trapper. The limp dead thing had not even hit the floor when I ran, much good it did me. He was on me before I could open the door beside me. His huge hands slammed me face-first into the door. My head burst into a storm of fireworks, my thoughts suddenly a mass of confusion. He yanked the cane from my fingers, tossed it back against the table. His hands gripping me by the hair, he drove my skull into the heavy door a second time, and pain exploded with a frightful heat as something trickled down from my forehead. Hot and wet.

  Then he hurled me back with a grunt. I stumbled until the edge of the bed struck my legs and I collapsed onto it, arms flung wide. A scratching came at the door, and he ignored me for a moment. He opened it and a white dog bounded into the room. The animal leaped to the bed and licked at the blood on my forehead. A great black splotch enveloped its right eye.

  “Now you see that? That’s Bull’s-eye,” Sikes said as he slowly closed the door again and stalked towards me. “You ask Fagin and he’d tell you, that’s my dog. He ain’t, though. No. Fagin . . . he’s my dog. Now, you beat my dog, sir. I don’t rightly mind, seeing as how he had it comin’ and all. But Fagin was right to object, you askin’ questions about Smithson as you were doing. Even when you were warned, you did it anyway. It’s bad manners, sir. And bad manners must be punished, mustn’t they? Worse, you asked about Annie. Kept askin’ and askin’, that’s what you did. Why would that be? Even when you heard she was Smithson’s woman, mine, if you take me as him—”

  “You’re not Smithson,” I said, sitting up even as the world spun and swam about me. “You’re the sweeper, aren’t you? The one who disposes of messes? I could elevate you. I have money—”

  “They all say that,” Sikes said wearily. “And, ‘You don’t have to do this!’ That’s my favorite, it is. Because of course I do. It’s my employment, and it’s fun, yeah!” His fist clocked me square in the face, and stars burst into my vision; I felt the blood flood from my nose.

  My hands groped blindly for anything I might use to protect myself as I swung my legs off the high bed and crumpled to my knees, another wave of vertigo seizing me. Sikes’ footfalls echoed and crashed like thunder as he surged at me.

  “I’m not sure you properly grasp your situation, sir.” His hand shot out with blinding speed and fastened on my throat. I tried to wrench my way loose, I beat at him, but he squeezed even tighter. “See this now? This is how I grasp!” With one hand around my throat, he brought the other to my face, wiped the blood from under my nose with his thumb, and made a circle of my own blood upon my forehead.

  “There,” he said. “A Bull’s-eye. Now I know where to aim.”

  He raised me up until my feet were kicking, then he whirled me about and slammed me against the wall. Then he pummeled my forehead, and my skull cracked against the wall again and again until—

  Nothing.

  Darkness had me. Death, I might have thought, if not for the ringing in my ears and the commotion I heard all about me. How long had I been unconscious? And why wasn’t I dead?

  My eyes opened sluggishly and my mouth was slack, my breathing harsh and uneven, my throat swollen, irritated. The skin about my neck burned, and I reached up, loosened my tie, opened the top buttons. I lay on the floor of the wretched room where Bill Sikes had been about the mundane task of throttling me while bashing my brains in, and I gasped for breath like a transplanted fish.

  Just as I forced myself to calm, a nearby explosion made the walls shake and a sudden thunder of running footsteps surged from the hall. Screams and shouts.

  “What’re you lookin’ at? I’m Bill Sikes. Nobody looks at me!” the madman was shouting from a distance, his hideous dog barking from even farther off. Gasping, struggling to command my aching arms, I crawled until I heard rapid footsteps and saw two untidy shoes and stockings stomp across the floorboards to where I was, on all fours, blood dripping from my split lips.

  “We must get out!” cried a woman’s voice, and I raised my head to see, through the bursting stars on the inside of my skull, a shock of scruffy red hair framing a milky white face.

  “The name’s Nancy,” she said. “There. Now I ain’t no stranger no more, you can trust me. Come on!”

  Another explosion, and we clung to each other as the house shuddered and something brilliant lit outside the curtained window, its glass crackling from the force of some unseen blow.

  I let her help me, and together we joined the pack of men and women in various states of undress making their exodus from thi
s sinful place. We passed through the Long Gallery, where Sikes was clapping his hands and screaming, “Bull’s-eye! Where are ye, ye mongrel!”

  But his back was to me, and he never turned. Not as my Nancy and I half-fell, half-dragged ourselves down the stairs, past the foyer, and out into the grey of a terrible, mad day.

  The Lycia—the building that smelled of terrible chemicals—was now a blazing inferno. Men rushed this way or that, pistols drawn. I heard the jolting blasts, saw men jerk and fall.

  I ran. The woman’s hand had been in mine, then we pierced a crowd, were jostled and clawed at, and then she was gone, her fiery red hair swallowed up by the tide of madness all about me.

  Two more buildings in the Royal Quarter were afire, and I saw a small man with wild eyes stand right in front of me, tears in his eyes, blood speckled about his face and hands.

  Roger Colley.

  “My brother! My brother, you bastards!” he said, firing a pair of pistols at some hard men who twisted and sagged. “Gonna have me a right benjo in his honor. Gonna see every one of you dead!”

  He didn’t notice me, and I kept with the crowd fleeing the Quarter.

  Soon finding myself on my own, I made fast progress through the myriad of stinking, squalid blind alleys, courts, and passageways between tall and narrow houses. A dense fog gathered. A hazy orange color rose from the Quarter behind me, hellishly reflecting the moist windows of fetid gin-palaces and coarse eateries. I pushed my way past drunken scalawags, past women with heavy makeup and rotting teeth. I rushed past ovens with roasting chestnuts and baked potatoes sold to starving lads for a farthing. Finally, I swept through a narrow alleyway into the large open court.

  Letting out a sigh, I wiped my brow and walked towards Furnival’s Inn, above which were my rooms. Smiling, I was already embracing the sound of merriment and the wafts of kidney pie and mulled ale when someone cleared his throat behind me.

  “Wotcher, Mr. Scrooge, sir!” called a guttural croak. Windows in the brick rows of houses and commercial buildings surrounding him were frozen on the inside. Gas lamps shone behind them betraying a rudimentary coziness, despite the smell of damp brick.

  I stopped and sighed. “Good evening, Humperdink,” I called back.

  Humperdink, an example of what passed these days for a municipal constable, wheezed and reeked of gin as he waddled across the court. The tightness of his uniform caused Humperdink’s body to release a vibrato of bodily gases as he walked. Yet he moved with surprising speed given his girth. “Mr. Scrooge, sir, so sorry to have interrupted your customary evening walk, sir. Most sorry indeed, sir. Oh, bit of a nasty bump to your lip there, sir?”

  I wondered how this oaf might be so oblivious to the severity of my beaten state. Perhaps it was the dimming light as afternoon passed to evening.

  “Unfortunate placement of a lamppost, Constable,” I mumbled.

  Humperdink cleared his throat. “Well, sir, and this is not a light matter in any sense, sir, but as a man of the law, it is my duty to protect the good people of London, sir, and naturally that would involve the sharing of the truth, as known by the Lord Almighty, sir.”

  Baring my teeth, I spat, “For the love of God, what are you on about, Humperdink?”

  “Well, sir, as the protocols of the courts would have it, sir, I must inform you that a certain Mr. Jack Colley met a bitter fate in the prison yard but a few hours ago. Stuck and bled out like a pig he were. We knows you went to see him, and his brother Roger, well, he might be quite of a temper about this here turn of events, see. And Inspector Foote, he tasked me to find you and give you, the, the wotsit, the heads up, as it were.”

  With that, the portly man turned on his heels and waddled down the slippery lane.

  I turned back to the inn, and a single thought burned in my aching skull: Gin!

  But Adelaide was there, laying in wait for me at a table near the window, wearing a breathtaking floral-print dress and an elegant wide-brimmed hat that cast haunting shadows over her eyes. In her lacy-gloved hands rested a pair of theatre tickets.

  “Aren’t you the fright?” she asked, rising and taking my arm. “Let’s get you upstairs, cleaned up, and ready for a night out.”

  “What? No!” I objected. And swirling in the back of my still aching head, Dodger telling me that The Lady always wore floral-print dresses . . .

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what you were doing that led you to this sorry state?” she asked. “No, never mind. One of those wealthy investors didn’t like the terms you proposed and got a bit handsy, did he?”

  “None of your concern,” I muttered darkly.

  “Well, what is of our mutual concern is that Miss Nellie Pearl had her servant hand deliver these invitations to tonight’s performance. She has Mr. Fezziwig’s invitation; you see . . . and requests not just our company, but also our assistance in an urgent matter. This is what we’ve been waiting for, Ebenezer.”

  I was halfway up the steps when I looked over and peered into her lovely eyes. In the span of just over twenty-four hours, I had found myself eye-to-eye with a trio of murderers. What had I to worry about in just confronting her about her lies?

  Instead, I turned away. A night at the theatre it would be.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE CACOPHONY IN the Adelphi Theatre’s main arena was like a roaring sea. Instruments were tuned as hundreds of people babbled and shifted, rustling into their seats and greeting one another. My head was still pounding from Sikes’ treatment earlier, and the silk cravat Adelaide had picked out to hide the swelling marks on my neck where he choked me was a cool comfort against the pain. Having just survived a murder attempt and nearly becoming a casualty in what was clearly a war between Smithson and Roger Colley, I would have preferred an evening clutching a glass of brandy in the bath, but my reluctance had not been long lasting. As Adelaide had put it, this was what we had been waiting for.

  I’d sent word to Dickens for him to round up a few more “war men” to keep an eye on myself and Miss Owen. Clearly, Smithson wanted me dead. All I could hope was that Roger Colley’s assault on the Quarter would keep the crime lord busy until our protection arrived. I told him we would say nothing of this to Miss Owen. I rather liked the idea of someone following her every move and reporting it back to me.

  Although the Adelphi was a smaller theatre with reasonably priced tickets, its location off the Strand attracted the finer folk. The congregation ahead surged with shiny top hats and exaggerated gowns. Adelaide wore a crisp green dress with a floral pattern of delicate fern leaves, and she looked every bit as astonishing as she had at the Dyer affair. My stomach flipped. A woman of her station sliding so effortlessly in to such society functions . . . Suspicion brewed.

  The narrowness of the atrium and the straightness of the sides rendered most of the seats completely comfortless, but the tickets Nellie had sent us secured us the very best seats in the middle, where we would be surrounded by London’s rich.

  With a smile and a twinkle of the eye, she caught the notice of a young usher to whom she presented our tickets. He burst into a flush of excitement when he spotted the backstage pass that Nellie had sent with the tickets.

  “Well!” he exclaimed. “A rare opportunity to meet The Lady, eh? The star of our show must hold you in very high regard.”

  Shock hit me like a quivering arrow. “ ‘The Lady?’ ” I asked.

  “The Lady of Shalott! She is one of the very best actresses we have ever had on this stage, our Miss Nellie Pearl is. Have you seen her perform yet? You shall be astounded! Let me show you to your seats.”

  A stirring of unease snuck into the back of my mind. Could Nellie be the mysterious Lady?

  Adelaide’s arm was linked with mine as we made our way down the arena past rows and rows of lush red seats, the balconies all decorated for Christmas. Gold and green and red twinkled in the shiny surfaces of crystal chandeliers and polished brass railings. Adelaide was calm and poised, exchanging polite nods w
ith wealthy patrons as we passed them. Her eyes met theirs with confidence, and she smiled. I felt my guard lowering as she brushed by me, filling me with tantalizing aroma of her rose perfume. But an image of her Tom, covered in my friend’s blood, flashed into my vision, and I immediately shook myself back to awareness.

  “You should simply tell me what’s on your mind, Mr. Scrooge,” she said without looking at me as we settled into our seats near the aisle.

  “A great many things,” I said, opening the program.

  Her eyes flickered to something at my left, and her cold glare burst into welcoming warmth. “Oh, look! Here is a description of Nellie’s role, The Lady of Shalott!” She leaned over me and pointed at the place in the program, her shoulder touching mine.

  “Well, I never!” exclaimed someone in the aisle, loud enough for many heads in the rows in front and behind us to turn. Mine turned, too.

  “Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge, how fortuitous to run into you here.”

  “Mr. Lazytree!” I said, jumping up to shake his hand. It was Sunderland’s agent, the one who had only last night orchestrated all those interviews with potential investors. “Very good to see you again, how do you do?”

  “Just out for a spot of entertainment with the missus, Scrooge. Loves the theatre, she does, don’t you, Winnie? Haven’t been since Villiers died, of course. Terrible.”

  “Villiers?” I asked.

  “Indeed! Owner of this very theatre! Stabbed over a hundred times, they said, I’m sure you’ve heard. And his secret mistress, too, would you believe. Nobody even has the foggiest who she was.” There was a gleeful flicker in his eye, and I could tell he was reveling in the gossip.

  “Yes, Crabapple mentioned—”

  “And I think I spotted this enchanting lady at the charity ball last night?” he said, delivering his hyena-like laugh and sending a cheeky grin in Adelaide’s direction, to the obvious annoyance of his wife.

  “Adelaide Owen,” said my associate, rising beside me and extending her gloved hand. The man kissed it without breaking eye contact with her.