Blackstone and the Rendezvous With Death (The Blackstone Detective Series Book 1

by Sally Spencer

  Turgenev had picked the right man to bet on. His money was already being passed back to him, supplemented by the money of the men who had put their faith in Iron-fist. The Count had made a great deal in a few minutes, yet as he checked his winnings his face remained as impassive as it had been throughout the whole fight.

  Two new fighters were entering the ring, but the thought of witnessing another bout of savagery sickened Blackstone.

  ‘I’ve seen enough,’ he told Hannah. ‘I’ll wait for you outside.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen enough, too,’ the Russian woman said, with an edge of distaste in her voice. ‘You may walk me back to my home.’

  Night had fallen while they’d been in the archway, and the mists that had risen from the river snaked their way through the narrow streets, giving the whole area north of the river an eerie, slightly unreal, appearance.

  But it was not the darkness or the mist that was disturbing Blackstone. He was thinking about the man who’d been watching him during the fight—the flat-faced man who didn’t look entirely comfortable in English clothes. Where had he come from? And why should he be interested in a police inspector? Blackstone had been the hunter for a long time—he didn’t like the idea that now he might be the hunted.

  They had reached the edge of Little Russia when Hannah said, ‘If you want a pint of bitter rather than a glass of Russian vodka, we had better stop soon.’

  An English woman would never have phrased it like that, Blackstone thought. She would never have assumed that they would be stopping for a drink at all. And she would have waited, even if a drink was what she wanted herself, until her escort suggested it.

  They were drawing level with a pub. Hannah stopped, looked up at the sign that was hanging over the door, and laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Blackstone asked.

  It’s called the Trafalgar,’ Hannah replied.

  ‘Something wrong with that?’

  ‘No. I just find it amusing the way you English always feel it so necessary to keep on celebrating your long-gone glorious victories.’

  ‘The trouble with victories is that for most people they’re just something they’ve read about in the papers,’ Blackstone said. ‘If they’d actually been there themselves, they wouldn’t use the word “glorious” quite so freely.’

  ‘I apologize,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Why?’ Blackstone asked, puzzled. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘That is the second time I have lumped you in with all the other Englishmen I have met. But you’re not like them, are you?’ Hannah touched him lightly on the arm again. ‘I’m ready for a drink now.’

  They entered the lounge, which was sandwiched between the public bar and the off-licence. Most of the customers were either middle-aged women or courting couples. Blackstone wondered whether some of the drinkers would mistake the two of them for a courting couple, and decided that any who did must also believe in leprechauns and fairies at the bottom of the garden.

  The pub did not serve vodka, but Hannah said that gin was an adequate substitute, and—based on what he’d seen of her previous drinking capacity—Blackstone ordered her a large one.

  They took their drinks over to a table in the corner. ‘You’ll forgive me for asking you,’ Blackstone said, ‘but I can’t see what you’re getting out of all this.’

  ‘Out of all what?’

  ‘Out of helping me like you have been doing.’

  Hannah shrugged. ‘I would have gone to see the fight whether you were there with me or not. Besides—’ her voice dropped—‘though I don’t know Charles Smith well, I am quite fond of him. And if he is in trouble, I am certainly willing to do all I can to help him out.’

  ‘I never said he was in trouble.’

  Hannah laughed. ‘A policeman turns up in Little Russia asking questions about Charles, and he is not in trouble? You must think I’m a very stupid person indeed.’

  ‘No,’ Blackstone said. ‘That’s one thing I wouldn’t accuse you of. But you’ll excuse me if I’m a little suspicious of finding a guardian angel in my first few minutes in alien territory.’

  Hannah laughed again. ‘I am far from a guardian angel. At best, I am a guide. And a very imperfect one.’

  ‘Imperfect?’

  ‘Yes. For instance, you asked me about Count Turgenev, and all I could tell you was common gossip.’

  ‘Nevertheless—’ Blackstone persisted.

  ‘If you are to understand me at all, you must accept that most of the things I do are for my own amusement,’ Hannah interrupted. ‘You do amuse me, Inspector Samuel Blackstone, and so I am prepared to spend some of my not-so-precious time with you.’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  Hannah gave him a beautiful, enigmatic smile. ‘And perhaps later I will ask for some token of that appreciation,’ she said, knocking back enough gin to make most men go cross-eyed. ‘But for the moment it is enough that you walk me back to my home.’

  It was as Blackstone rose from his seat that he saw the man standing at the public bar.

  ‘Do you know him?’ he asked Hannah.

  ‘Know who?’ the Russian woman asked.

  But where the man had been positioned, there was now nothing more than an empty space.

  It was almost as if the man hadn’t been there at all, Blackstone thought. But he was convinced he had—holding his pint of ale in the same unfamiliar, uncomfortable way as he had been pretending to enjoy the fight under the archway.

  Fifteen

  The pubs were closed and the streets all but deserted as Blackstone made his way back to his lodgings. If someone had been following him he would have known about it—and no one was. Yet he still could not shake off the feeling that even if the flat-faced foreigner was not watching him now, it was merely a respite.

  The gas light in his landlady’s front parlour was still flickering when he reached the house. Blackstone unlocked the front door with his latchkey and stepped into the hallway. He hesitated for a moment, then knocked lightly on the parlour door.

  ‘Come in, Mr Blackstone,’ said a voice from the other side of it.

  He opened the door and popped his head inside. His landlady, Mrs Huggett, was sitting on a low stool in the centre of the room. In front of her was a hollow cardboard cylinder that she had just glued together, and while she held it firmly with one hand, she sewed a bottom on to it with the other. To her left was a stack of cardboard from which she would make more of the cylinders, and to her right were several teetering towers of completed hat boxes.

  ‘Still at it, I see,’ Blackstone said.

  His landlady smiled.

  ‘Gawd, Mr Blackstone, yer so sharp yer should be a detective. Yes, I’m still at it. Got ter be. Yer don’t get rich makin’ hat boxes at two an’ a tanner a gross.’

  ‘I shouldn’t imagine you would.’

  Mrs Huggett reached for another sheet of cardboard, and as she did, the expression on her face changed to one of mild disapproval.

  ‘Yer missed yer supper again,’ she said accusingly. ‘It’s a sin to waste good food, yer know.’

  She sounded just like his dead mother, he thought. In so many ways she was just like his mother.

  ‘A policeman can’t always choose the hours he works, you know,’ he told her.

  ‘Well, it’s no skin off my nose,’ the landlady said, though she still sounded offended. ‘Yer pay for yer meals whether yer eat ’em or not.’

  ‘True enough,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘Well, I’ll wish you good night Mrs H.’

  ‘Good night, sleep tight, an’ make sure the bugs don’t bite,’ the landlady chanted automatically.

  Blackstone stepped back out into the corridor. From the kitchen at the back of the house came the unmistakable odour of boiled beef and cabbage, and he found himself thinking back to the sumptuous meal he’d eaten earlier in the day at the expense of Lord Dalton.

  He climbed the creaking, protesting stairs, and opened the first door to the left at the top of th
em. This was where he lived—or rather, this was where he slept. A room just big enough for a narrow single bed, a wardrobe, a washbasin stand, a bookcase and a rickety writing table.

  He could move, he thought. On an inspector’s salary he could afford much better than this.

  But then Mrs Huggett would have to go to all the trouble of finding another suitable tenant. Besides, he had better—much more worthy—uses for the money he saved by lodging where he did.

  Blackstone walked over to the bookcase, selected On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, then slipped the volume back on to the shelf. He was too tired to pick his way through Mill’s complex arguments on what constituted the greatest good for the greatest number that night.

  He started to undress. The other lodger, Mr Dimmock, who was a traveller in patent tooth powder, was often away for days at a time. But tonight he was home, and Blackstone could hear him snoring loudly through the thin wall.

  Blackstone hung his suit and shirt, and climbed into bed. For a while, he just lay there, his mind full of the visions of another way of life he had caught a glimpse of in the previous days—Earl Montcliffe’s town house, Lord Dalton’s club—and then he drifted into sleep.

  *

  The air, which enveloped him like a tightly fitting overcoat, was hot and dry. The smells that filled his nose were exotic and totally alien to the streets of London. Blackstone had absolutely no idea where he was—but he strongly suspected that he should.

  He looked around him. The walls of the room in which he found himself had expensive silk carpets hung from them. The floor beneath his feet was tiled with an elaborate swirling pattern. And through the window came a noise that sounded like the roar of an angry, wounded animal.

  Blackstone moved over to the window—his body felt so light that it was almost as if he were floating rather than walking—and looked out. In the courtyard below him he could see the turbaned heads of perhaps a couple of dozen Indian soldiers. They were holding a line, and had their bayonets at the ready. Beyond them, on the other side of the compound wall, stood a howling mob of two or three thousand men. The men were variously armed with spears, swords, daggers and muskets. Some were even carrying the lances they used when on horseback. They were dirty, unkempt creatures, but from the odd scraps of uniform that some of them were wearing, it was possible to work out that they were what—in Afghanistan—passed for soldiers.

  So now he knew where he was. He was in Afghanistan. In the British Residency in Kabul. He even knew the date—the 4th of September 1879—and what was about to happen.

  This is impossible, he told himself. I can’t be here. I’m not due to arrive until it’s all over. I’m with Roberts, not Cavagnari.

  Yet, he could not dispute the evidence of his own eyes. He was there—feeling the heat, smelling the smells, listening to the howling of the mob.

  The door opened, and a tall, upright man strode into the room. Blackstone recognized the new arrival at once. He was Major Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari, the half-French half-Irish adventurer who was already a legend on the Northwest Frontier.

  Cavagnari looked him straight in the eye. ‘This is a bad business, Sergeant Blackstone,’ he said. ‘A very bad business. Those Afghan soldiers out there haven’t been paid for months, and they blame us for it.’

  Blackstone nodded—how did he dare merely to nod to an officer? he wondered—and then turned his attention back to the scene outside. He saw tall, fierce Pathans, shorter but no less frightening Tajikis, Uzbeckis and Hazari—tribes that spent much of their time fighting each other, but now were united in the hatred of a common foe.

  He found his eyes drawn to one particular man. He was standing close to the edge of the mob yet seemed, in some subtle way, to he controlling it. He was an imposing figure—well over six feet tall, which was large even for a Pathan—and was draped in a black cloak. Immense malevolent power seemed to emanate from him, and though the lower half qf his face was covered with a cloth, he looked vaguely familiar.

  Blackstone turned back to his chief:

  ‘How can the Amir allow this?’ he demanded, again surprised at his own effrontery. ‘We’re supposed to be under his protection, aren’t we?’

  Cavagnari did not take offence. Instead, he merely gave a hollow laugh.

  ‘I’d rather be under the protection of my washerwoman than under the protection of that clown Yakub Khan,’ he said. ‘I’ve sent messages to him asking for help, and do you know how he responded?’

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘He said his horoscope was not favourable to doing anything himself. He sent his son to try to disperse the mob. The boy is only eight years old—and so, of course, the rabble would not listen to him.’

  There was fresh activity down below. Under the urgings of the tall man at the edge of the crowd, a number of Afghani soldiers were advancing cautiously towards the gate with bunches of kindling in their hands.

  ‘They’re going to try and burn us out!’ Blackstone said.

  Cavagnari nodded his head gravely. ‘I’m not surprised. But they’re in for a surprise if they think we’ll he easy game for them. They may kill us all, but not before we’ve accounted for at least ten times our own number.’

  Blackstone shook his head. Was it worth dying, just so that in a few years’ time there’d be a pub called the ‘Cavagnari Arms’? he wondered.

  There was a smell of wood smoke in the air now, and clouds of black smoke were beginning to rise over the wall.

  The Russians are behind this,’ the major said. ‘They’ve never forgiven us for forcing the Amir to expel their mission, and they have agents provocateurs all over Afghanistan preaching hatred against the British.’

  And a lot of good it does me to know that, Blackstone thought.

  The archway over the gate crumbled, the gate itself fell with a loud crash, and the howling mob rushed forward, leaping through the flames.

  The Indian troops in the courtyard went down on their knees, and fired their rifles. The first wave of Afghanis did a crazy, demented dance as the bullets hit them, then fell to the ground only to he trampled by the horde immediately behind them. Some of the Indian soldiers managed to fire a second volley, but it was a fairly ragged response, and now the demonstrators were setting about them with knives, spears and clubs.

  ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,’ Cavagnari said, and then, for the benefit of his uneducated sergeant, he added, ‘Sweet and honourable it is to die for your country.’

  And Blackstone, as he checked the bolt on his rifle, hoped that, while he had no wish to die for his country, he could at least die like a man.

  *

  Blackstone found himself sitting upright, the top edge of his bed sheet clasped tightly in his hands. The entire mission to Kabul had been slaughtered swiftly and without mercy, he remembered. But he had not died because—as he’d told himself when he’d first realized where he was—he wasn’t really there at all.

  No, he’d been in India at the time of the massacre, and it was not until months later—when he’d been one small part of the five battalions of infantry that General Roberts had march with much pomp and circumstance into Kabul—that he’d even seen the residency.

  Its floors had been stained black with dried blood, he recalled. Its grounds had been strewn with the bleached bones of the defenders—which was all that was left of them when the vultures had finished their work. It had been, all General Roberts’ soldiers agreed—a vision of hell.

  Blackstone’s heart was beating at double rate. He wondered why, after eighteen long years, he should suddenly have had such a dream. And why, if he was to dream about Afghanistan at all, it should be of an event he’d never witnessed?

  Why not, instead, remember the march from Kabul to Kandahar? What a memorable event that had been! Three hundred and thirty-three miles across some of the toughest terrain in the world. They had frozen at night, yet in the day the mer-ciless sun had peeled strips of skin off their unprotected hands and faces. They had
had to contend with dust storms and mountain passes, and when they had reached Kandahar, exhausted and sick, they had still had to fight a battle with a rebel army.

  So why not dream of that? He did not think of himself as a particularly imaginative man. Why weave himself into something he had only heard about second-hand?

  There had to be some purpose to it, Blackstone decided. He ran through the dream again in his mind. Realizing he was in Kabul. Hearing the mob. Talking to Major Cavagnari as if they were equals.

  None of that was it! None of that pointed him in the direction in which he wished to travel!

  Even though his bedroom was in total darkness, he squeezed his eyes tightly shut in the hope that would aid his concentration.

  And suddenly he had it! The dream was not about himself! Or about the Indian troops! It was not even about Cavagnari! No, it was about the tall dark-cloaked man with a rag over his face, the man who had been standing at the edge of the mob and urging it on.

  Though Blackstone knew he would never be able to prove it, he was convinced that that man had not been an Afghani at all. He had not even been an Asian. No, he was European—and his name was Count Turgenev.

  Sixteen

  It was the third pawnbroker’s shop that Sergeant Patterson had visited that morning. Like the previous two, its main entrance was—for the sake of discretion—down a side street, and the only sign of the nature of the business conducted inside was the three brass balls, or ‘swinging dumplings’ as they were popularly known.

  Inside, too, it resembled the previous establishments he had called at. A single counter ran the length of the room, but on the customers’ side it had been divided into booths, so that those with something to pawn could have a modicum of privacy.

  Not that there were many customers at that time of day. A chimney sweep—as was obvious from his sooty clothes—stood in one booth, trying to persuade the counter clerk to increase his offer for the brushes he held out in his blackened hand. Three booths down from him, a woman of genteel appearance was whispering earnestly as she held out a silver photograph frame. But other than that the place was deserted.