‘Come on!’ she said, an almost artificial lightness in her tone. ‘Let me show you around.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
February 1905
East London
Wesley piped up, his tone suddenly businesslike.
‘My brother and I,’ he said, ‘run an employment bureau of sorts. We provide men and other services for many of the shops and businesses round here. One of our blokes is nightwatchman at a warehouse on Brick Lane, near them steam baths. You know? The ones the Yids all go to of a Friday? Called Shevviks or summat.’
I knew the building: the Russian Vapour Baths, owned by a man called Schevzik. The sign above the entrance said ‘Best Massage in London’ and offered relief against a number of ailments from rheumatism to gout, and situated as they were, opposite the Brick Lane synagogue, most of its patrons were Jews, washing themselves before going to their temple across the road.
‘Anyway, last night,’ continued Wesley, ‘around one in the morning, our man Reggie sees a bunch o’ them Yids, three lads, all shifty-looking, jimmying open one o’ the windows. ’E says one o’ the boys climbed through, then, fast-as-you-like, makes his way to the front and opens the door for the others.
‘Well, at first Reggie thinks they’re robbin’ the place, but then he thinks, “Who robs a bathhouse? What they going to steal? Soap?” So he has a little chuckle to hisself at the thought of a bunch o’ mad Yids lookin’ for stuff to nick, thinkin’ they’re going to feel a mite foolish when they come out wi’ nuthin’ …’
‘And?’ I asked.
Wesley placed his hands on the table. ’Well, that’s just it,’ he continued. ‘They didn’t come out. Not all of them anyway. Three went in, but only two came out.’
‘You think they were hiding Vogel?’
‘Either that or they killed him in there. But I’d guess they were hiding him. Why else would they break in at the dead of night? It’s right in the middle of Brick Lane, but the only folks what go in there are Yids, and if, by some chance the police were to search it, they’d not be able to see more than two feet in front of themselves on account of all the steam. A man’d stand a good chance of slipping away.’
It made sense. With the ports and stations being watched, doing a runner, even if Vogel had a destination in mind, would be risky. It would be better to lie low, bide his time until the heat died down and then make a bolt for it. But lying low presented its own problems. In and around Whitechapel he’d need to stay out of sight. People knew him, and sooner or later, someone would report him to the police. Outside of the area, he’d stick out like a sore thumb, easily spotted as a foreigner and a Jew. The best plan was to stay local and off the streets, but that was easier said than done. He’d be recognised at the doss house or the soup kitchens, and judging by the state of his room, he seemed to have fled with nothing. As for money, he might have been up to date with his bills, but I doubted he had the cash for a few nights in a single room at a flop house let alone a guest house. As Rebecca had speculated the previous evening, maybe he had gone to the anarchists? They might be minded to help him hide from the police, and the bath house might not be a bad bolt-hole, at least till something better could be organised.
‘We’ll need to move fast,’ I said. ‘If he is at Schevzik’s, they probably won’t keep him there long.’
Wesley nodded in agreement, but it was Martin who spoke.
‘We’ve done our civic duty, Constable. What you do with the information is up to you.’
I made to rise, but before I could, Martin reached over and put a vice-like hand on my wrist. ‘Before you go though,’ he said with a grin, ‘at least finish your drink.’
I stepped out into the night, the doors of the Bleeding Hart swinging closed behind me, cutting off the raucous voices, the warmth and the smell of beer like a guillotine. The cold hit me, clearing my head as the adrenaline began to course through my veins, I focused on the chance to catch Vogel and dispelled all doubts about my Faustian pact with the Spiller brothers.
The question was what to do next. The sensible thing would be to run to the station in Leman Street, alert the duty officer and ask him to send word to Inspector Gooch, then to fetch Whitelaw and wait for orders. But Gooch lived out west, on the other side of town. Getting word to him and waiting for his arrival would take at least two or three hours. I wiped the rain from my watch. Under the light of the pub window, I read the time. It was already close to midnight. If the Spillers were right, and Vogel had been deposited at the Russian Baths at around one in the morning, he’d have been there almost twenty-four hours already. Who was to say that his accomplices wouldn’t move again in the dead of night? It was the safe thing to do. Indeed they might have done so already, but I doubted it. People were still awake, some of them still in the streets. To move him now would risk detection. The odds would be better at 1 a.m. There was no time to wait for Gooch. Precious little to try and find Whitelaw either. That left me with few options.
The blue lamp above the door cast an unearthly glow on the sodden pavement outside the station house. I raced up the steps, threw open the doors and darted in, causing the dozing desk sergeant to start.
‘Wyndham?’ he said, looking up from the newspaper spread across the counter. ‘What you doing here at this hour? You look like a drowned rat.’
‘Tip-off,’ I said, fighting to catch my breath. ‘On the Bessie Drummond case.’
That woke him up.
‘What sort of tip-off?’
‘Possible location of a suspect.’
‘You mean the Jew?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Who’s the senior officer on duty?’
The sergeant puffed out his cheeks. ‘That would be me. We can try and send word to that inspector of yours, or wait till morning.’
I slammed my hand on the newspaper on the counter. ‘We need to move now! The gen might only be good for an hour or so. If Vogel’s there, we need to catch him now, before he has a chance to run.’
‘If?’ said the sergeant. ‘How reliable is this tip-off?’
‘I don’t know. It’s second-hand and almost twenty-four hours old.’
I could see his scepticism growing.
‘I’m not sure we want to be waking the inspector on the basis of a day-old, half-baked sighting.’
I ran a hand through my rain-soaked hair. My chance to catch Vogel felt like it was slipping away.
‘We don’t need Gooch to check out the tip-off. I could go with whatever men we have here.’
‘There’s just you and me here, lad. The others are out patrolling their beats. They’ll most likely be back in an hour, so you’ll have to wait.’
That was too long.
‘I’ve a better idea,’ I said, ‘but I need the key to the gun cupboard.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
The lamps had been smashed.
Brick Lane was shrouded in damp, velveteen darkness and the baths a few hundred yards away were all but invisible. They occupied a three-storey building on the east side of the street, a striking sight in daylight, with an ornate iron awning shaped like an onion dome above the door, and the words Russian Vapour Baths picked out on a stained-glass background. But as I said, now you could barely see it, because the bulb in the street lamp beside it had been smashed.
The lane was dead, the usual midnight malingerers taking shelter from the deluge somewhere else. I stopped half a block away to take stock and fiddled nervously with the trigger on the Bulldog revolver. Dim light seeped through naked gaps between the curtains of neighbouring buildings, but the bathhouse remained still and black as the grave.
I ran for the shelter of the dome-shaped awning and there stopped to catch my breath. Above me, the rain hit the awning with a metallic thud before flowing in torrents down either side like the Red Sea being parted. The doors were in an alcove recessed into the brick facade. They had iron rings for handles and, pulling on them, I found them locked tight as the Bank of England, not that I expected anything less. T
he Spillers’ nightwatchman had said the men had gained access through one of the windows, but that seemed impossible, seeing as the baths had no windows on the ground floor. From the front at least, Schevzik’s bathhouse was little more than a door flanked by the entrances of other concerns: those of Rosenberg’s pawn shop on the left and an ironmonger’s on the right. The only windows forming part of the bathhouse were on the first and second floors.
For a moment, a cold fear coursed through me. Had the Spillers sent me off on a wild goose chase, or worse, lured me here for some other purpose? I took a breath to calm my nerves, reminding myself that the Spillers probably had half the officers at Leman Street in their pockets. They had no reason to dupe me.
Of course their man at the warehouse across the road might have been mistaken. But that too seemed fanciful. Seeing three men crawl through a window which wasn’t there didn’t seem like a mistake you made easily. Unless you were drunk.
In desperation, I turned and tried the doors once again. They trembled but remained firmly shut. I gave up, leaned against the wall to one side of the alcove, pulled out my fags and lit one. On a board on the wall opposite was a sign painted with the legend:
Keep fit & well with regular visits to the
Russian Vapour Baths
Invaluable relief for rheumatism,
gout, sciatica, neuritis, lumbago
and allied complaints
I laughed bitterly. I supposed if I caught the flu from being soaked to the skin tonight, I could always pay a visit in the morning in search of a cure. That’s when I noticed something odd. The paint on the sign had been scratched away at one corner, revealing not coarse wood, but something smoother. I bent down to take a closer look, and with the nail of my index finger, scratched at the paint around the scar. It came away with some difficulty, but the effort was worth it. I looked closely and smiled. The sign had been painted, not on a wooden board, but onto the glass pane of a window. I ran my fingers along the base of the sign and located the outline of the window frame. It seemed old and worn, and sure enough, after a few tugs, it cracked and came away, opening in my hands.
I pulled it wide, crawled through, then fell off a ledge into the blackness beyond, landing face first on a cold, stone floor. For a moment I lay there, dazed, concerned that my unorthodox entrance might have alerted anyone holed up inside. I listened for the slightest sound, but heard nothing save the dripping of water.
Rubbing the bump on my head that was already beginning to form, I rose to my feet, my eyes adjusting to the insipid grey light that seeped in through the gap where the glass pane had been. In the gloom I made out two rows of wooden cots which I guessed were massage tables. Picking my way between them, I made for an open doorway at the far end.
Beyond was a small room, permeated by a damp chill, its floor slick with water and treacherous underfoot. I reached out and steadied myself against a tiled wall. Somewhere close by, water dripped: a regular splashing that suggested a worn seal or a loose tap.
Suddenly, over the noise of the water, I thought I heard a sound, so faint that I wasn’t sure if I hadn’t simply imagined it. A spastic, nervous energy coursed through my veins as I closed my eyes in concentration and held my breath. Seconds passed, slowly, rhythmically, measured out by the metronomic dripping of the water and the beating of my heart. I told myself my ears were playing tricks and exhaled. As I did, I heard it again, the muffled fall of what might have been footsteps on the floor above.
Quickly, feeling my way along the wall, I stumbled up to a door. Beyond lay more darkness. Again I heard the noise above, louder this time, and more frantic. I groped forward blindly, hoping to make purchase with something solid and finally touching a wall opposite.
Light was falling from somewhere up ahead.
I made for it. But the wall suddenly gave way to air. Once more I reached out, my hand closing around what felt like a banister. I turned, felt with my boot for the first stair and began to climb. Straight ahead, a thin shaft of light seeped out from under a door. Suddenly the step beneath me creaked like the opening of a coffin. The noises from the room ceased abruptly. I imagined Vogel, or whoever was in there, holding their breath, much as I had done minutes earlier, straining to hear, waiting for the sound to repeat itself. I thought fast and took a decision. When the element of surprise was lost, the next best thing was generally speed.
So I ran.
Full pelt, up the stairs, forsaking all pretence of masking my approach, reaching the landing and continuing headlong, smashing shoulder first into the door ahead. The wood gave way and the door swung back wildly on its hinges, slamming into the wall with a crash. I steadied myself and looked up. Before me, in the light of a flickering candle, stood a thin man with a knife in his hand and a look of unbridled fear on his face. In an instant I knew I’d seen him before. The night Bessie Drummond had been accosted in Grey Eagle Street. This was the man I’d chased and lost on the rail tracks at Shoreditch.
I reached into the pocket of my coat, feeling for the heft of the revolver, but found nothing. Frantically, I searched the other pocket. It too was empty. As a wave of panic surged within me, I realised I must have dropped it, probably when I’d entered the building and landed on my face. It was all rather inconvenient given the man in front of me had a blade. I was out of uniform, sopping wet and had just broken into the building. If he stabbed me, he’d have had a good chance of convincing a jury that he’d acted in self-defence, assuming of course that he was rich and an Englishman. But from the look of his clothes and the skullcap on his head, I doubted he met either criterion. What’s more the expression on his face gave me a whisper of hope. It wasn’t the look of a killer but of a man in fear of his life.
‘Police!’ I said. ‘Drop the knife.’
He stood there, frozen. Then the look of fear changed to one of alarm. He breathed heavily, his eyes frantically scanning the room for a way out.
‘Put the knife down,’ I said, raising my hands, palms open.
His eyes were now focused on the door behind me.
‘Vogel,’ I said.
The mention of his name caught his attention.
‘There’s no escape. Other officers are on the way. Don’t make things worse for yourself.’
The hand that held the knife was shaking, and so, I hoped, was his resolve.
‘I did not do this thing,’ he pleaded. ‘I did not kill her!’
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘You’ll get a chance to explain everything down at the station. Now drop the knife.’
He looked at his hand as though he’d forgotten he was still holding the blade, then slowly knelt down and placed it on the floor, before rising once more, this time with his hands up.
From behind me came the noise of a door opening, then voices. It seemed the cavalry had arrived just as the danger had passed but in time to claim the glory.
‘That was sensible of you,’ I said to him. ‘Up here,’ I shouted.
‘I did not kill her!’ Vogel repeated, this time shaking his head. ‘You must believe me.’
‘So why did you run?’ I asked to the refrain of boots on stairs.
Vogel uttered a forlorn grunt of a laugh. ‘Where I am from, families are killed, villages burned on the rumour that a Jew has murdered a Gentile.’
‘This is England,’ I said. ‘You’re innocent until proven guilty by a jury. Same as anyone else.’
He shook his head. ‘I see the way your people look at us, the lies printed in the pa—’
He was cut off by the sound of men bursting in through the open doorway. I turned, expecting to see Whitelaw at the head of a detachment of officers. Instead the man standing there wasn’t the sergeant and the men behind him certainly weren’t the cavalry. Before I could react, two of them leapt out from behind their leader and came at me. The first, a lean chap with a scar on his forehead and a face like a skull, threw a punch at my head. I managed to parry the blow and a sharp jolt of pain ran up my forearm, just as the second man,
this one shorter and thicker with the physique of a street fighter, rushed me. I was thrown back by the force of his charge and it took all my concentration just to stay on my feet, which was a pity because it meant I never saw the next blow coming – another to my face. This one made contact and a bomb went off in my head a second before the lights went out. By the time I’d gathered my wits, I found myself pinned to the wall, my arms held in place by the two men.
The leader approached, said something to Vogel and received little more than a mumble in reply. He spoke again and I found I couldn’t understand what he was saying. My first thought was that the punch to the head had somehow scrambled my brain.
He turned to me and looked me up and down as though appraising an animal fit for the knacker’s yard. He was young, though not as young as his lackeys. His eyes were dark, his chin covered by two-day-old stubble and his head by a flat cap which, like his clothes, had seen better days.
‘Who are you?’ He spat the words out like wasp stings. His accent was German, like Leo Dryden doing an impression of the Kaiser in a music-hall routine.
‘A policeman,’ I said, struggling uselessly against his two accomplices.
‘That’s what our friend here said –’ he gestured to Vogel – ‘but you don’t look like one. Where is your uniform? Did you not bring a pistol to arrest such a dangerous man? Or even a truncheon? To me you look like a thief.’
Death in the East Page 18