The Humbug Murders

by L. J. Oliver

As soon as we set foot in the barn, we were accosted by an almost impenetrable darkness and a stench so foul and evil that I had to fight to keep from doubling over in nausea. I had smelled this macabre miasma of decay before, deep in the limestone tunnels where Dickens had forced me to confront our recklessness.

  “Handkerchiefs, now,” whispered Crabapple as he finished silently loading his gun. We pressed our silk handkerchiefs against our noses.

  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I noticed that the space had been converted into something of a labyrinth by a series of tall three-panel room dividers. We moved into the first space as quietly as we could with our footsteps shuffling through frozen straw. My foot brushed against something, and I crouched down to examine it. A chipped plate. Looking round, I made out the silhouettes of several more plates and bowls dotted in the corners of this room. Rancid bits of food still festered despite the freeze. Bread, meat . . . human food. What humans had eaten off the floor like animals?

  I pointed it out to Crabapple, and he nodded solemnly. We rounded the side of the first divider, Crabapple’s gun leading the way. We used quick, silent movements to dodge any sudden oncoming assault. None came but the assault on our eyes by the horror laid out in the dark space.

  Thick iron rings were bolted into the walls in long lines, chains hung down weighted by heavy metal shackles. Rough blankets were crumpled under each one, dried bloodstains speckled across several. Unemptied piss pots stood in the corner, their contents frozen yet putrid.

  I nudged Crabapple and pointed to a small table in the corner. Empty tincture bottles lay toppled, bloodstained surgical knives tossed carelessly onto the surface, as if thoughtlessly discarded once used. I picked up a bottle and read the label. Laudanum. Another—industrial ether.

  Against my will, my imagination began painting a vivid and gruesome picture of what this place was. The missing women imprisoned here, tortured into submission and drugged, chained—waiting for the sweet release of death. I pressed Crabapple on; I needed to leave this room.

  We inched our way to the second divider; Crabapple stopped to check the gun was cocked and then nodded. We rounded the corner and stopped dead.

  The decomposing body of a girl no older than twenty was laying on the ground, her foot still shackled to a chain—and a man, with his back to us, was towering above her with an axe held high above his head.

  “Feelin’ a bit contrary, are you, Mary?” he gruffed and sniggered to himself. He was just about to bring the axe down to sever the foot and free the body. I recoiled in horror, stifling a cry, but as I stepped back, I rattled a piss pot.

  The man turned, gasped, threw the axe at us! It spun through the air, the handle striking Crabapple’s elbow just as his gun went off, the fiery burst carving the darkness but missing the man. His shadow vanished behind the next divider.

  Someone pushed between me and Crabapple and surged after the man. Adelaide! But instead of rounding the corner, she threw herself at the divider, bringing it crashing down on the man, pinning him to the ground. Adelaide let out a cry of pain as she landed on top of the pile, a sharp edge stabbing her side.

  I rushed to her aid while Crabapple yanked the wriggling man free from under the fallen wall, jamming his gun into the man’s bleeding mouth.

  “Are you all right?” I asked Adelaide, checking her side for signs of impalement. “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m well, thank you, Ebenezer,” she said cautiously. She studied my face, looking, I gathered, for some sign that my continued anger at her betrayal—despite its understandable cause—was beginning to subside.

  I looked away.

  She dusted herself off, wincing slightly as her hand brushed her bruised side.

  “We’re going to have a little chin-wag, you and me,” said Crabapple to his prisoner, shaking the gun so the metal barrel ground and crunched the man’s teeth. “You’d better start talking!”

  The man emitted a pained squeak and a series of terrified, unintelligible mumbles. Tears, snot, drool, and blood were mingling about his mouth as Crabapple stared furiously at him.

  “Well?” barked Crabapple. “Talk! Oh, right you are, my apologies.” He removed the gun from the villain’s mouth—and punched him sharply in the gut.

  Dickens rushed in shortly after the gun had gone off and helped to drag the whimpering man to the previous pen. We shackled him to one of the posts. Shen wandered in, glum and glassy-eyed just as Crabapple moved off to continue to search the premises while I interrogated the brute. Though bruised and broken, the man remained tight-lipped, though I could not tell whether it was from defiance or shock.

  Crabapple returned shortly, reporting to have found three more bodies, two of the women appearing to have died from starvation, one from injuries following a beating. According to the constable, only one of them was on his missing-persons list, the other two were not. The case was clearly far bigger than we had thought.

  Adelaide’s knees buckled, and I caught her just as she sank. Steadying her, I looked into her eyes. “Adelaide,” I whispered.

  “My Tom was mixed up in all this,” she whispered, her lips trembling. “All these poor women . . . Tom . . . could he have known about this? Could he, really?”

  I stared into her big green eyes, the pain and grief coursing through her at the thought of how far her brother might have sunk was pushing her to the breaking point. We needed answers.

  The man beside us sniffed pitifully, and my patience cracked. I snatched Crabapple’s gun and cocked it, pointing it directly between the man’s eyes. “Enough. Talk now.”

  Whether it was the sight of the gun’s dark, merciless barrel or the embarrassment of having soiled his trousers that finally broke the man, I shan’t guess. But when I pressed the barrel of the gun hard into his forehead, he confessed to being a lowly clean-up man, hired by nameless criminals across London to remove evidence and dispose of bodies. He had been called out here before, he said. Some girls had seen fit to die from exhaustion or infections. He claimed that many were brought in by boat from foreign places, kept in pens like this until they were needed. Drugged into submission for ease of control. When Crabapple asked whether they were raped, Adelaide pressed her face into my chest, but the man shook his head. If one like him did that, he said, he’d wake up with bits of him gone that he’d never want to lose. That was how The Lady did things.

  “But I never seen what happened to none of them lasses after they left here, I swear,” he continued, his desperation finally releasing his voice like a deluge. “They emptied this place this morning, took ’em all away. Well, except the dead ’uns. Which is why I’m here again.”

  The man’s lip began to wobble again and he sniffed.

  “Who sent for you? Who runs this scheme?” Crabapple barked at him. “Roger and Jack Colley?”

  “No, no!” the man cried, shaking his head. “Well, I mean, it’s odd. Like, they did have something to do with it, then all of a sudden, we was told never to associate with them dark, bad men again. I got the word that if I so much as spoke with demons like the Colleys, I’d have me throat slit!”

  “The world suffered a great injustice that you never did,” I said.

  Shen shifted, his eyes flashing with anger as he stared at the man. His lips were curled in disgust and fury. “This is all connected to those photographs,” he said, the sound of his voice laced with poison. “They have defiled Miss Pearl’s image, her legacy, and you—you have allowed it!”

  “I never did nothing!” cried the man.

  “Thomas Guilfoyle!” Adelaide shouting, rounding on the villain. “Do you know that name?”

  The man shook his head.

  “Why this place?”

  “It’s all complicated like, now inn’t it? I mean, half the time they just find places like this abandoned and the like, and just take ’em.”

  Crabapple chewed on a toothpick, working it out. “So Guilfoyle knew this place would be used for no good, but it wasn’t likely he’d been told spe
cifics.”

  The fury went out of Adelaide, but a fierce determination filled her. “All right. All right, I can face it now. Whatever comes next. So long as he wasn’t a partner to this depravity.”

  “I’d like a quiet word with this man,” Shen said, back straight, feral smile flashing.

  “Well, well, well, Mr. Shen,” said Crabapple. “Finally some flames stoking you back to life, some passion, eh? Well, yeah, sounds good. See to this man, will you?”

  “No!” cried the man as we left him, broken and shackled in the shadow of a grinning and vengeful Shen.

  “Don’t kill him, we need a statement,” Crabapple called back as we walked past the dead bodies and towards the barn doors at the back. “But he don’t need to be able to walk for that, now does he?”

  Fresh air rushed into my lungs as we emerged out of the dark hell of torture and death and into the crisp winter countryside. Adelaide was pale, but some of her strength returned with the breeze. Still she avoided my eyes and kept herself a few paces away from us.

  “This is clearly all connected,” I said. “We need to speak with Sarah, the Nellie doll from the Quarter. She could tell us more.”

  “Oh yeah, now there’s a good idea,” Crabapple said. “How many times has it been that Smithson’s tried to have you murdered?”

  Dickens shook his head. “We don’t know if any of these women ever returned after being used like this. They might have been shipped off to other lands or dumped in the Thames.”

  “But the Quarter is a part of this,” I insisted. “The boy said as much. And that smell, the flammable chemicals at the Lycia—”

  “The what?” interrupted Adelaide, suddenly raising herself up and standing tall, a new surge of interest running through her. I raised my eyebrows and repeated the word.

  “That’s their lair. Their headquarters. The Chimera, the three-headed, fire-breathing monster, born out of the fires of Lycia. A female monster. The Lady.”

  “With a head of a lion. The king of the Royal Quarter—Smithson, of course,” added Dickens, drawing sketches of the beast around his elaborate notes.

  “The Colleys knew of the place, knew it well enough to know it would go up in a blast,” I said. “They were an integral part of the enterprise. The third head, I’d guess. The women were nothing but goods, shipped like cattle. I’d wager the words Colley sang, ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockleshells, pretty maids all in a row,’ was code to signify the arrival of a shipment. The women, they were what the Colleys claimed had been stolen from them. But why in the deuce would they have thought Sunderland had them?”

  Adelaide sighed. “Something went rotten in this devil’s trinity,” she whispered. “They turned on each other.”

  Crabapple nodded, his moustache twitching. “Yes, yes. That’s why the gorilla in there was warned not to have anything to do with Roger and Jack or their boys. But where are the women now?”

  The doors to the threshing barn burst open, and pitiful sobs rang out from inside. Shen marched out, his knuckles bruised and torn, but his face alive again, a glint sparking in his eye.

  “Right, then,” said Crabapple. “There’s enough here to get me back on track. I’ll head back to Scotland Yard and alert the force. I’ll need copies of your notes, Dickens. We’ll get to the bottom of this, though will I get any credit for it? No, I will not, Inspector Foote will see to that.”

  Shen’s smile widened. “You may decide not to alert Scotland Yard yet, Constable,” he said quietly, replacing his gloves finger by finger. “Before I turned his knees to dust, he claimed he was protected, insured via his employers. In fact, he evoked the name of a certain Inspector Foote as the one to call if there was trouble.”

  Crabapple spun round, his hands clutching his hair, furious curses and profane obscenities streaming from his mouth like bullets.

  “Well, I never!” chuckled a cheeky voice behind us. “Fruity language like that in front of a wee child!”

  And from round the corner of the shed poked a top hat, then a ruddy face with a snub nose. Dodger’s grin was wide, and he was chewing the end of a pipe.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded.

  “Whas’ wiv ’at one?” Dodger demanded, looking over at Shen. “He’s got a right case o’ the morbs, he has!”

  “Don’t worry about him. I ask again, why are you here?”

  “On account of needin’ to speak wiv’ you, Mr. Scrooge, sir! Urgent business, you understand; businessmen like me and you often have urgent meetin’s like this. Spotted your wagon trundling off from London, so I caught up and hitched a ride. Thought I’d wait until you was done playing on the farm, but you’re taking such a frightful long time.”

  “I said I’d get back to you when I was ready.” I sighed, rubbing my temples. “This is dangerous, Dodger.”

  “Very dangerous, Mr. Scrooge, sir!” the boy agreed, his head nodding eagerly and his top hat slipping backward and forward as he did. “And you see, I would have waited for you, but an opportunity has arisen, and I’m the sort of very finest businessman what takes risks and jumps at a chance for profit! Just like you!”

  “What the devil are you talking about, boy?” shouted Crabapple.

  Dodger looked indignant for a moment, like a crucial business meeting was being interrupted by a tea lady, but cheered right up. “The time is now, gentlemen! Oh, excuse me, and lady. But we ’ave to move fast. It’s a ways from here, see, down in Temple Brook. I never thought you’d come all the way into Essex! My fingers were right frozen clinging on all that way!”

  “Temple Brook?” Adelaide asked.

  “Rutledge’s country house,” I said. “Of course. Of course that’s where they’d take them.”

  The lad continued to boast that he had thought of a cunning plan. Scowling at Crabapple suspiciously from time to time, he explained that he knew exactly where the magician, the photographer, would be tonight, and that the very best way to secure the secret to photography would be to kidnap the scientist. He even offered to overpower the man himself and tie him up.

  “It’d be easy,” he boasted, describing the man as little and funny, always wearing white and black stripes with silly round glasses tinted dark as night: he’d never see Dodger coming, the boy theorized.

  My heart jumped. I’d seen that man. He had been the one man in the Doll House receiving the “specials of the house” without benefit of a ring. The same little man in the zebra suit.

  “We’ll get our hands on him, Mr. Scrooge,” Dodger said with a toothy grin. “We’ll get him to teach us and others how the magic works, and we’d be set for life on account of being extremely rich, you see! Bob’s your uncle!”

  A lifetime of fortune and prosperity flashed before my eyes but in a split second had been replaced by the darkness of the hell I had just left.

  “No,” I shook my head sadly. “This is beyond the worth of any profit margin.”

  “But he’s up there right now!” cried Dodger. “With all them ladies! Chance of a lifetime, see, Mr. Scrooge! And by tomorrow, well, it’ll all be over, see. They’re shipping him elsewhere. It’s what The Lady wants. She’ll be there, just to make sure it all goes off right smooth. . . .”

  The first person I looked at was Adelaide. Her face sported an expression of urgency, her eyes wide and her lips slightly parted. Dickens was nodding. Shen might have had steam pouring from his nostrils at the chance to further avenge his Nellie. If not now, then when?

  The time had passed four in the afternoon, and the drive to Temple Brook was five hours. That didn’t take into account how long it might take to stop and find a few honest men—and men of that sort were fewer by the hour as Shen’s revelation about Foote had revealed. And God forbid, there were snow drifts on some of the narrow and winding country lanes.

  By tomorrow, all the women could be dead. Any chance of solving the hideous mystery would be wiped like melted snow. Still, who knew how many men m
ight be patrolling the place? The handful of us against what nature of a beast?

  “Look, I knows what I’m talking about,” Dodger assured us. “Ain’t never been a sneak thief like me. I sneaked about the Lycia, hitched rides and sneaked about that fine house, and ain’t never any o’ them punters ever had a clue I was there. I know the secret ways in and out. You needs me!”

  A howl whistled through the bare branches in the surrounding woods as a frigid gust swept snow across the fields. “It’s there,” whispered the distant and frozen voice of Fezziwig. “Humbug is waiting. The next, then you, Ebenezer. Unless you stop it.”

  I stamped my cane on the icy ground. “I’m going. Any of you have the courage to follow me, come along. Otherwise, rot in hell.”

  One by one, the others followed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  WE STOPPED A mile outside Temple Brook and stepped upon the moonlit road leading to Rutledge’s country estate. The rushing breath of the ocean lapping onto jagged stones greeted us as we removed lanterns and other provisions from our carriage’s boot. An icy wind kicked up as Shen dug into his flush pockets and paid our driver a handsome sum to wait here for us until morning. I turned to Adelaide and made one final appeal.

  “Miss Owen—Adelaide—this is far too dangerous,” I told her. “Even young Dodger saw the sense in staying behind. Take the carriages and go, I beg you.”

  “And Ebenezer Scrooge is not one to beg,” she said distantly, her gaze fixing on a reddish glow in the distance and the sounds of revelry accompanying them. “Not even if the hounds of hell were scratching at his door. Why would you think me any different?”

  “There is bravery and then there is madness,” Shen said as he joined us. “For once, I’m in agreement with Mr. Scrooge. Quite enough of you have taken leave of your senses by getting mixed up in this. I have one woman’s blood on my hands. I would not have another’s.”

  “Not even The Lady’s?” Adelaide asked.

  Shen turned away. A good deal of his strength and swagger had returned. He and I were decked out in our finest suits. Adelaide was once again dressed as a lad, but not the sooty-faced beggar she’d pretended to be in the Quarter. Her hair was slicked back, her bust strapped, and she wore the clothes of a young footman.