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

by Sally Spencer

  A middle-aged man emerged from a door at the other end of the room. He ran his eyes professionally over Patterson’s face and good second-hand suit, then said, ‘I’m Mr Dawkins, the general manager of this establishment. What are you? The police?’

  Patterson grinned ruefully. ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘It’s part of my business to spot things like that,’ the other man replied. ‘What can I do for you, officer?’

  ‘I’d like to speak to someone who handles more expensive items than your normal customers bring in,’ Patterson said.

  ‘How much more expensive? Are you talking about stately coronets or humble silver service?’

  ‘Did you say coronets?’ Patterson asked, astounded. ‘You’re not telling me you do business with the royal family, are you?’

  The pawnbroker laughed. ‘Not with our royal family, no. They’d never stoop to anything like that. But some of the continental royals aren’t always so particular. Do you know,’ he continued, lowering his voice, ‘we got a pledge from a certain Austrian nobleman of his coronet. And can you guess how much we advanced him on the strength of it?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Patterson admitted.

  ‘Fifteen thousand pounds!’

  Patterson whistled softly, did his best to try to comprehend such a huge amount of money, then remembered why he was there.

  ‘I think I’m more interested in quality cutlery, silver plate, and watches,’ he said.

  ‘In that case, you’d better speak to our Mr Tompkins,’ the pawnbroker said. He gave Patterson a knowing look. ‘He’s our resident expert on the kinds of things that servants steal.’

  *

  Patterson sat in one of the private offices that were reserved for clients who demanded extra discretion, and looked across the table at the man who was an expert in the kinds of things servants steal.

  Thaddeus Tompkins was a small man of around thirty. He had thinnish black hair that was swept back from a widow’s peak, crafty brown eyes and a sharp nose. He didn’t seem the kind of man who allowed himself to he fooled by his customers very often. But then, neither did he look entirely comfortable in the presence of a policeman.

  ‘Tell me, do you often get offered stolen property, Mr Tompkins?’ the sergeant asked.

  The other man shrugged. It was probably meant to be a casual gesture, Patterson guessed—but it didn’t quite come off.

  ‘Not too often,’ the pawnbroker’s clerk said.

  ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

  ‘Once a week, at most. Some weeks we don’t get any at all.’

  ‘And how do you know it’s stolen?’ Patterson demanded.

  ‘I...er...look through the Police List.’

  ‘And if it’s not on the list, then you automatically accept it as a pledge, do you?’

  The pawnbroker’s clerk shook his head—a little too vigorously. ‘No, of course I don’t,’ he protested.

  ‘Why? What’s stopping you?’

  ‘The Police List isn’t comprehensive.’ Tompkins held up his hands as if he were afraid Patterson might take it as a personal criticism. ‘It’s not your fault, but it isn’t. Some the articles I’m offered aren’t on the list because the owners don’t even realize they’ve gone missing.’

  ‘So what leads you to suspect that the articles are, in fact, stolen?’

  Tompkins shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  ‘You can tell by the way some of these people are dressed that they couldn’t afford the things they’re trying to pawn. And then there’s the way they act. Their hands won’t keep still...’

  And neither will yours, the sergeant thought.

  ‘...and they’re forever looking over their shoulders,’ the pawnbroker’s clerk continued.

  ‘So what do you do when you’ve decided the pledge they’re offering is stolen?’ Patterson asked. ‘Call the police?’

  Tompkins hesitated. ‘I used to.’

  ‘But not now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The pawnbroker’s clerk shrugged again.

  ‘I used to ask them to wait while I attended to something else, but most of the thieves are as frightened as rabbits, and if there’s any delay in handing over the money, they do a runner. So by the time the constables arrive, there’s nobody for them to arrest. That’s why I don’t bother them anymore—because it’s nothing but a waste of police time.’

  ‘You could detain your suspects until the police arrived,’ Patterson pointed out.

  ‘You mean physically?’

  ‘If that was what was necessary.’

  ‘I tried that once,’ Tompkins said, ‘and got knocked to the floor for my pains. Look, I’m a law-abiding man, Sergeant, but I don’t really see why I should get hurt just to defend somebody else’s property.’

  It was a fair point, Patterson thought—if, that was, the pawnbroker’s clerk was telling the truth.

  The sergeant reached in his jacket pocket, pulled out the photograph of Thomas, Charles Montcliffe’s valet, and slid it across the table. ‘Have you seen this man?’

  Tompkins studied the picture carefully. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. I’ve got a good memory for faces.’

  ‘Tell me about your meeting with him.’

  ‘He came in a few days ago. He offered me a hunting whip with a sterling silver handle. He wanted two pounds. I’d have offered more for it—but not to him, because he clearly wasn’t the owner.’

  ‘How did he react when you told him you wouldn’t accept the pledge?’

  ‘He was almost in despair. I think he needed money quickly—probably to pay off a gambling debt.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell me?’

  ‘Only that I don’t think he would have tried to sell it somewhere else after he’d failed here.’

  ‘And why’s that?’

  ‘Because he’d summoned up all the nerve he had to come and see me. Once I’d turned him down, he wouldn’t have had the courage to take the whip to anyone else.’

  ‘So what do you think has happened to him?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Take a guess,’ Patterson said.

  ‘He...he may have gone back to the village he came from—many of these servants are country boys originally. Or perhaps he’s already paid the price for defaulting on his debt. Maybe in a few days, or a few weeks, you’ll find him floating in the Thames with his throat cut. He could even be posing as a pauper, and hiding in one of the workhouses. But I doubt that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He looked far too well-fed to pass himself off as a vagabond.’

  Patterson stood up. ‘Thank you for your help.’

  ‘That’s all?’ Tompkins asked, the relief evident in his voice.

  ‘For the moment,’ Patterson said heavily. ‘But I may want to talk to you again.’

  *

  Thaddeus Tompkins stood at the window, watching the policeman walk down the street until he passed out of his range of vision. Even now, some minutes after the encounter, the clerk was sweating.

  He wondered, almost hysterically, whether Patterson had noticed how worried he’d been, and, if he had, what conclusions the policeman had drawn from it. He could only pray that if Patterson had been suspicious, that suspicion had centred on him being a dealer in stolen property. Because then he only ran the risk of going to gaol—and he could survive imprisonment. On the other hand, if Sergeant Patterson had guessed the truth...

  With trembling hands, Tompkins picked up the telephone. When the operator asked him what number he wanted, he couldn’t control the shake in his voice.

  The wait while he was being connected couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, yet it seemed interminable. Then a voice said, ‘G’day?’

  ‘They’ve been, Mr Seymour,’ the clerk said. ‘Or at least, one of them has.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Sergeant Patterson.
’

  There was a pause, then the other man said, ‘Yes, I know all about him. He wanted to know if you’d seen Thomas, did he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did you tell him?’

  ‘Exactly what you instructed me to—that he’d tried to pawn a riding whip with a silver handle, but that I wouldn’t accept it.’

  ‘Good.’

  Tompkins wished his heart would slow down a little—wished he could draw some small comfort from the other man’s last word.

  ‘I will be all right, won’t I?’ he asked.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Now that I’ve done what you wanted me to, I’ll be looked after?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry on that score,’ the other man said reassuringly. ‘You’ll certainly be taken care of.’

  Seventeen

  Fresh bunting continued to appear all over London—thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Union Jacks fluttered in the breeze—but as far as Little Russia was concerned, the Jubilee might not even be happening.

  And why should these people get excited about the sixty years of Victoria’s reign? Blackstone asked himself as he walked down Church Lane, looking at the women in their bright peasant headscarves and the men with their long white beards. Why should they glory in the fact that she ruled a quarter of the world’s surface and nearly a quarter of the world’s people? They felt no emotional attachment to the British Crown. Their loyalties lay with a vast, wild land that was thousands of miles away.

  He caught sight of Hannah, who was standing in front of the cigar shop just ahead of him, and was almost surprised to discover that his heart had started to beat a little faster. It was absurd that someone at least fifteen years younger than he was should produce this effect on him, he told himself—but there was no doubt in his mind that she did.

  She smiled at him, and he felt the heartbeats crank up a little more. ‘It was good of you to spare me your time,’ he said.

  ‘It’s no trouble at all,’ Hannah replied. ‘As I’ve explained before, men like you are something of a hobby of mine.’ The smile turned into a rueful grin. ‘There I go again—there are no men quite like you, are there? At least, not in England.’

  He tried not to bask too much in the glow of her approval. She made him feel almost boyish—and that was not a state he felt entirely comfortable with.

  ‘Where will our investigations be taking us today?’ he asked, injecting a semi-official note in his voice.

  ‘We’re already there,’ Hannah told him.

  She took a step to the side and pointed to a wooden door. Several notices were pinned to it, written in those squiggles that made perfect sense to the inhabitants of Little Russia, but were meaningless to Blackstone.

  Yet there was one notice, written entirely in English, that he did understand.

  Free Russian Library

  Open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

  Blackstone looked questioningly at Hannah. ‘A library? What’s the point of going to a library?’

  The woman laughed. ‘It is not just a library. It is a place where Russians come to meet their friends and catch up on all the news from home. I brought Mr Smith here, and I thought you might want to talk to some of the people who talked to him.’

  ‘That might be useful,’ Blackstone agreed.

  ‘But you must not expect them to be like your English witnesses,’ Hannah cautioned. ‘They are Russians, and so they are suspicious of all officials. Even if they want to help, they will pick their words very carefully.’

  ‘I’ll remember that,’ Blackstone said.

  She was almost running his case for him, he thought, and was surprised—this woman always seemed to be surprising him—to discover that there was at least a part of him that didn’t really mind.

  Hannah took his hand and led him through the door and up a flight of stairs. Was holding his hand really necessary? he wondered. And did he really care whether it was or not?

  The library was housed in a single room. Every inch of wall space had bookshelves fixed to it. Two wooden tables ran down the centre of the library, and there were a couple of desks at the far end. It really wasn’t much of a place to speak of, yet already, only half an hour after it had opened, it was filled with men who—judging by their dress—came from all walks of society.

  Hannah led him over to one of the desks, at which a grey-haired woman was sitting.

  ‘This is Olga,’ she said. ‘She is the librarian. Olga, this is Mr Blackstone. He is a very important English policeman—but do not worry, he is really as gentle as a lamb. He has some questions he wants to ask you.’

  The librarian gave Blackstone a guarded smile. ‘How can I help you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d like to know everything you can tell me about a man who Hannah brought here,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Smith,’ Hannah prompted. ‘You remember him, don’t you?’

  The librarian nodded. ‘Yes, I talked to him.’

  ‘If you will excuse me, I would like to look at the latest papers which have come in from Russia,’ Hannah said tactfully, before turning and walking towards the other end of the room.

  Blackstone pulled up a chair and sat down opposite the librarian. ‘What did you and this Mr Smith talk about?’ he asked. ‘Could it perhaps have been Count Turgenev?’

  Olga’s eyes filled with unease. ‘He...he did ask me about the Count,’ she admitted, ‘but there was nothing I could tell him.’

  ‘But you have heard things about Turgenev?’

  ‘My business is with books. I was not in a position to tell Mr Smith what he wanted to know.’

  ‘And what exactly did he want to know?’

  ‘He asked what the Count had done before he came to London. I told him that if Count Turgenev is like most of the dvorianstvo—’

  ‘The dv-what?’

  ‘The aristocracy. If he behaved like most of them, he will have spent a great deal of his time eating, drinking and hunting. But do not put too much importance on his questions about the Count,’ the librarian continued, with a pleading note creeping into her voice. ‘It was only the second time he came to see me that Mr Smith wanted to know about him.’

  ‘And what did he want to know the first time?’

  ‘He asked me if I had seen an Englishman.’

  ‘An Englishman?’ Blackstone repeated.

  ‘Yes. He said the man he was interested in was under thirty years old and probably dressed very smartly. He wanted to know if such a man had ever visited the Russian library.’

  ‘And had he?’

  ‘I do not think so. I do not see what interest such a man could have in coming here.’

  ‘Smith didn’t say why he was interested in this man?’

  ‘He claimed that the man was a relative of his, but I do not think he was telling the truth.’

  ‘Why?’

  The librarian shrugged. ‘I just do not think he was being honest with me. Do you not ever get that feeling?’

  All the time, Blackstone thought—but already his mind was changing gear as he felt the familiar prickle at the back of his neck.

  He swung round suddenly. The flat-faced man, whom he had seen at the archway boxing match and in the pub, was standing at the top of the stairs. Their eyes locked. The other man showed neither surprise nor fear. If anything, the eyes said that after so much pussyfooting around, they welcomed such direct contact.

  ‘You see that man standing in the doorway?’ Blackstone asked the librarian out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Yes, I see him.’

  But even as the librarian spoke, the man was calmly turning his back on them and beginning to descend the stairs. Blackstone was on the point of following—of demanding to know what the hell his game was—when something inside him counselled caution. It was possible, he argued, that following him was exactly what the man had intended him to do. It was possible that the foreigner was nothing more than a decoy, leading him into a trap.

  The Inspector turned
his attention back to the librarian. ‘What can you tell me about him? Do you know who he is or where he lives?’

  The librarian shook her head. ‘No.’

  But there was something in that single word that was far too evasive to allow Blackstone to willingly to drop the subject.

  ‘You might not know his name, but he’s not a complete stranger to you, is he?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’ve never spoken to him.’

  ‘That isn’t what I asked.’

  ‘He has been here two or three times in the last few days,’ Olga admitted reluctantly.

  ‘For what purpose? To read a book? To glance through the Russian newspapers?’

  The woman shook her head again. ‘He just stands near the door for a while, and then leaves. I think perhaps he is lonely. They are often lonely when they first get off the boat.’

  ‘You mean, he’s only recently arrived in England?’

  ‘That is right.’

  ‘How d’you know that, when you don’t know his name and have never even spoken to him?’ Blackstone asked suspiciously.

  The librarian laughed with what sounded like genuine amusement, and for the first time since the start of the interview, she seemed relaxed.

  ‘Many of the new arrivals come from small backward towns on the Steppe,’ she said. Tor them, London is nothing like they could ever have imagined. Even for those who are used to the sophisticated life of Petersburg and Moscow, this city is a confusing, and often frightening, place. And they show it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘By the puzzled expression which never leaves their faces. By the uncertain way they move.’

  ‘But this is Little Russia,’ Blackstone pointed out. ‘It must be just like being at home for them.’

  The librarian laughed again. ‘To those of us who have lived here for some time, it begins to feel like Russia. But for those who have just left the real thing, it is a strange, alien place.’

  Maybe she was right, Blackstone thought. Perhaps the man whose path had crossed his three times in less than twenty-four hours was a new arrival. But even if that were true—even if he found himself disorientated by London—he also seemed to have a sense of purpose about him. He was, the policeman decided, nothing less than a man with a mission.