Death in the East

  I reached into my coat pocket and nervously pulled out my Capstans. A square of white card fell out and onto the ground. I bent down, retrieved it and turned it over. It was one of the business cards Albert Harmsworth of the Gazette had given me. With a bitter laugh, I crushed the damn thing, shoved it back into my pocket and extracted my matchbook.

  I lit a cigarette, smoked it down to the fag end, and it was only as I stubbed the butt into the pockmarked yellow mortar of a brick wall that it struck me. I fished out Harmsworth’s crumpled card and flattened it out. Albert Harmsworth, it read, Crime Desk, Illustrated Gazette. At the bottom a telephone number and a Fleet Street address.

  ‘You’ll think of something,’ Gooch had said.

  With a look to the heavens, I smiled, pulled my coat tight around me and headed back to Leman Street station.

  Harmsworth answered on the sixth ring.

  ‘I’ve got a story for you.’

  The rain fell like bullets and I sought sanctuary under the oversized portico of St Paul’s. I watched as Harmsworth, his overcoat slick and buttoned to the collar, struggled up the hill from Ludgate Circus. As he walked up the great steps, the bells of the clock tower chimed the quarter-hour.

  ‘I could have come out to Whitechapel,’ he said as we shook hands.

  ‘No need,’ I said. ‘I fancied a change of scene.’

  ‘You fancy a pint?’

  ‘No.’

  Instead I accompanied him to a coffee house on Paternoster Row.

  ‘I must say, I was surprised when you telephoned,’ he said, hanging our sopping coats on an overloaded and precariously balanced stand beside the door. ‘Last time we met, I got the impression you weren’t exactly keen to talk to the press.’

  ‘Things are different now.’

  I took a seat at an empty table while Harmsworth ordered the coffee. The place was warm and stuffy and busy for the hour – how many people went to a coffee shop once the pubs had reopened for the night? I guessed the numbers had been swelled by passers-by seeking shelter from the elements outside. By the window, a grey-faced, grey-uniformed nanny sat with a steaming cup in her hand, her thoughts several thousand miles distant, while her charge drew patterns in the condensation.

  ‘So,’ said Harmsworth, taking a seat, ‘what’s so bloody important that you couldn’t mention it over the telephone?’

  ‘First,’ I said, ‘we need to establish some ground rules.’

  A pretty waitress brought the coffees as I told him my conditions. In no way was my name or position to be mentioned, either directly or even obliquely. After today, he was not to contact me again, at least not for a year till whatever furore had passed.

  ‘Naturally,’ he said, breezily waving away my concerns. ‘You’ll have full anonymity. I always protect my sources.’

  ‘And there’s one more condition, but we’ll get to that later.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Now what is it you want to tell me?’

  I sat there, sipped my coffee and spelled it out for him: everything I’d pieced together, from Caine’s murder of his wife, through the murder of Bessie and the framing of Israel Vogel to Tom Drummond’s drowning only twenty-four hours ago.

  By the time I’d finished, Harmsworth was sweating like a condemned man, beads of perspiration glistening on his top lip.

  ‘We can’t print any of this. Caine’ll sue. He’ll take us to the cleaners.’

  ‘He might,’ I said, ‘but you’re insured. And anyway, isn’t that a decision for your bosses to make?’

  Harmsworth shook his head. ‘They wouldn’t print it anyway. You want them to splash a story across the front page saying the Jew we’ve been pillorying is innocent and the real killer is a respectable English businessman? The paper would be a laughing stock.’

  ‘If they’re smart, they’ll print it,’ I said. ‘For a start, Caine’s not a respectable anything. He’s an East End hatchet man with more than average smarts who’s bought and bullied his way to where he is. He’s a man above his station, no more a member of the establishment than you or me. I think there’d be quite a few among the great and the good who wouldn’t mind seeing the likes of Caine taken down a peg or two. As for the Jews, don’t tell me Lord Rothermere or Northcliffe, or whoever it is that owns your paper, really believes a few thousand immigrants in the East End are a threat to the nation?’

  Harmsworth shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘He just wants to sell papers,’ I said. ‘And this story will sell: corruption, the death sentence hanging over an innocent man – trust me, people will lap it up. Admit the Gazette was duped. Start one of your moral crusades, for Christ’s sake. It’s what you’re good at. Your public will love it. Caine might try to sue you, but you can crucify him in the court of public opinion. You might even become famous.’

  He looked at me and I could see the cogs turning.

  ‘Why are you so keen to see Caine take the rap?’

  What to tell him? That I felt personally responsible for Bessie’s death? That this was guilt, or the last vestiges of love, or some wretched combination of the two? Was trying to save Vogel my attempt at atoning for my sins … for my weakness?

  Probably.

  ‘Because Caine’s guilty,’ I said.

  ‘Let me talk to my editor.’

  FORTY-ONE

  Two days later, when the presses at the Gazette started turning, Caine’s name was all over the front page. At 7 a.m., I bought a copy from the vendor outside Whitechapel station. It turned out to be a prescient purchase. They were sold out by nine.

  The days ticked by and the stories multiplied. One paper after another began to follow the Gazette’s lead, like sheep taking courage from the beast immediately in front. I marvelled at the irony. The same rags that had a week before been attacking not just Vogel but all the Jews of Whitechapel were now turning their fire on Caine. Maybe it was a quest for justice, or maybe just a quest for more sales. After all, there’s only so long you can scream about the sky falling in on people’s heads before your readers look up and realise that it’s still there.

  Caine, of course, threatened to sue, not only the Gazette but the others as well. That too was an irony. You could, it seemed, be sued for telling the truth about one rich man, but spread a thousand falsehoods about the poor and you still got off scot-free.

  But the tide was turning. Vogel was becoming, if not a celebrity, then at least a cause célèbre. There were questions in Parliament and talk of appeals to the Home Secretary. So I was in bullish mood as I left the station one night. I stopped and picked up a copy of the Gazette from the grey-haired old geezer with the stoop and three-day-old stubble who sold them on the corner of Hooper Street. Sure enough it contained details of a new inquiry which had been launched into the circumstances of the death of Helena Caine. It seemed that, one by one, Caine’s friends in high places were deserting, and the word in the station was that a warrant for Caine’s arrest was imminent.

  So it was rather upsetting, then, that two feet from my front door, I should be waylaid by a gent asking for light, and that as I reached into my coat, I should feel the bomb-blast thump of a cosh against the back of my head and my own lights should go out.

  I came to with a searing pain in my temples which was complemented by a burning in the tendons of my shoulders. My senses gradually returned and I found myself tied to a chair, my arms lashed firmly behind me. I tried to free myself, but any movement resulted in a jolt of pain as my arms wrenched from their sockets.

  I stopped struggling and forced myself to breathe. To get a grip. To figure out my circumstances. Wherever I was, it was cold, pitch-black, wet and silent. There was a tang of the Thames in the air, that dull, sewage-laced aroma which permeated the areas closest to the river.

  I shouted for help, my voice echoing in the stillness. It suggested a large space. A hall or, more likely, a warehouse. There were plenty of them by the dockside, and if the docks were where I’d been brought, it stood to reason who�
�d ordered my abduction.

  I shouted once again. This time my vociferation was met with a fist to the back of the head.

  A voice behind me called out, ‘Keep it down, sonny, if you know what’s good for you.’

  The voice sounded familiar, but with my brain still scrambled, I couldn’t quite place it.

  A moment later a light came on and Martin Spiller was standing above me.

  ‘Sam,’ he said. ‘It pains me to see you like this, lad. I thought we had an understanding.’

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘You were warned not to ask any more questions about the Bessie Drummond business, remember? Just take the credit for catching Vogel and let nature take its course.’

  ‘He’s innocent.’

  ‘Not according to the courts.’

  ‘You’ve seen the papers. He was framed. Stitched up by Jeremiah Caine.’

  Spiller grimaced. ‘That’s the problem, you see. Mr Caine is a business associate of ours, and he says you’re the one who’s been spreading these lies to the press. Claims you’ve been blackening his name. Of course, Wesley and I vouched for you. Told him you were a friend. That you’d never do something like that, but he doesn’t seem to be convinced. Asked us to bring you in for a friendly chat.’

  ‘We’ve had our chat,’ I said. ‘Can I go now?’

  Spiller feigned surprise. ‘You misunderstand. Not a chat wi’ me. A chat wi’ him.’

  There was a scrape of metal on the hard floor, the sound of someone rising from a chair, and then Jeremiah Caine appeared and stood next to Spiller. He was dressed in a long black overcoat with a fur-trimmed collar.

  ‘Constable Wyndham.’ His voice was firm, but level. ‘Do you realise the trouble you’ve caused?’

  I laughed under my breath. ‘I’m beginning to.’

  My words were met with a punch to the face, and suddenly I tasted blood in my mouth.

  ‘It’s a shame it’s come to this,’ he said. ‘Mr Spiller tells me you’re a bright lad. You could have gone far.’

  ‘Why’d you do it?’ I asked. ‘Why’d you kill her?’

  ‘Who? Bessie or my wife?’

  I spat out a mouthful of blood. ‘Your wife. I know why you killed Bessie.’

  Caine smiled thinly. ‘You remember Henry the Eighth? Same reason. Helena was Roman Catholic. She wouldn’t give me a divorce.’

  ‘So you electrocuted her? You couldn’t have just poisoned her, like every other disgruntled husband in London? A spoonful of arsenic in her tea?’

  ‘You’ll never stand out if you do what everyone else does. Besides, it seemed appropriate,’ he said. ‘Modern, even. Who’d have thought the bloody housemaid would figure it out?’

  For a moment he seemed genuinely perplexed.

  ‘Bessie was always a bright girl,’ I said. ‘But you could have just paid her to keep quiet.’

  Caine stared at me in disgust. ‘And let myself be blackmailed by some charwoman? I don’t think so.’

  In the distance a ship’s horn blew. Spiller turned to Caine.

  ‘You need to go,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of this.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ asked Caine.

  ‘Unless you want to get your hands dirty again.’

  Caine nodded. He made to leave, but then thought better of it. He stopped, turned, and walked back to me.

  ‘It’d be rude to leave without saying goodbye, Constable Wyndham.’

  With that he launched another fist at my face, and had it not been for the ropes around my limbs, this one would have knocked me off my chair and possibly into the following week.

  By the time I regained my wits, Caine had left the room and Martin Spiller stood in front of me once more.

  ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Wyndham. Going to the press was a bloody clever move. I doubt Caine ever thought he’d be brought down by a bunch of newspapers.’

  I considered making some quip about the pen being mightier than the sword, but it wasn’t funny enough to justify the risk of another punch to the face.

  ‘He’ll hang for his crimes,’ I said. ‘Now that the investigation’s been opened, it’s only a matter of time.’

  Spiller shook his head. ‘Alas no, my young friend. I’m afraid not. You see, Caine’s still got one or two friends left. They’ve tipped him off that the warrant for his arrest’ll be issued soon. Told him to get out of the country, and that’s just what he’s doing right now. Hopping on a steamer and sailing off into the sunset.’

  ‘Not exactly a happy ending,’ I said.

  ‘Happier than yours though.’ With that he called out, ‘Finlay!’

  There were footsteps and then the cadaverous frame of Archibald Finlay appeared. A blade glinted in his hand.

  ‘’Allo, Constable Wyndham. I must say, I never expected for things to end like this. Can’t say I’m upset though. You’re an arrogant little shit. Slittin’ your throat’ll be a pleasure.’

  I needed to think quickly. I turned to Spiller and clutched at my last straw.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Hear me out. D’you really want to kill a copper? That’s the sort of thing that’ll make life difficult for you and your business associates.’

  Spiller rubbed the side of his face. ‘I don’t see as how I’ve much choice. After what you’ve done, letting you go would be bad for business.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be,’ I said. ‘Especially if Caine’s fled the country. I’m not interested in going after anyone else. The only thing that mattered to me was catching Bessie’s killer. Think about it. Killing me would be a wasted opportunity.’

  Spiller smiled. I could see him running the numbers in his head.

  ‘I’ll need to discuss it with my brother.’

  With that he walked out, with Finlay a few steps behind.

  He never came back that night. No one did. It took me several hours to loosen my bonds, but eventually I managed it, and crawled out of the warehouse in time to see the sun coming up.

  The day after, a warrant was issued for Caine’s arrest in connection with the death of his wife Helena. By then of course, Caine was en route to the West Indies. Word was put out, and a few days later, the navy carried out an interdiction on the high seas. They failed to find him. Several of the crew said they’d seen him jump as the destroyer pulled alongside. Others would later claim he’d never been aboard.

  I remembered the painting I’d seen in his drawing room the day I’d first met him – the clipper caught in a gale on the high seas. Had it inspired him to take his own life or fake his own death? Either way, I could take no satisfaction from the news. Even if he was dead, I felt cheated. I wanted to have been there. To have seen his face in those final moments. To see the fear, the realisation in his eyes. And if he was alive … well, that didn’t bear thinking about.

  The coroner would issue a verdict of death by misadventure. It was the same day they hanged Israel Vogel.

  FORTY-TWO

  February 1922

  Assam

  The car door opened and out stepped the blessed vision of Emily Carter, draped in green silk and with the wealth of nations glittering around her neck. Any pleasure I might have taken from seeing her was, though, replaced by shock a moment later. The other door opened and I was confronted with the figure of a man dressed in a tailored dinner jacket, wing-collared shirt and black tie. This time there was no doubt. His hair may now have been iron-grey and the prizefighter’s physique may have gone, but the features on the cold, hard face were still the same.

  This was the man I’d seen at Lumding station; the man who’d killed his wife, ordered the execution of Bessie Drummond; the man who’d sent Israel Vogel to the gallows and who by all rights was supposed to be dead: Jeremiah Caine.

  A snap of fear, cold and violent, ran down my spine. I watched as he walked round the car, took Emily Carter’s hand and led her towards the steps. Without once glancing at each other, they processed up the stairs like royalty, stopping to acknowledge the flattery of courtiers
en route. And then they were at the door and disappearing into the club. I felt a hand on my elbow.

  ‘There’s your adversary,’ said Preston. ‘Mr Ronald Carter, lord of Jatinga. She’s too good for him of course, but, as they say, money talks.’

  Before I could react, there came a crashing thud, then another two in quick succession. Something hurtled to the ground, hitting the veranda a few feet from where I stood. It was a bird, stunned and broken. Within moments another smashed into the terrace. In shock, I turned to Preston.

  ‘It’s starting,’ he said.

  I looked out across the valley. Everywhere, birds were falling out of the sky, throwing themselves to the ground like hailstones. The veranda suddenly thronged with bodies as the people inside, English members and Indian staff, stepped out to witness the scene. Behind me a waiter uttered a prayer under his breath.

  I was suddenly overcome by a sense of deep foreboding. The sight of so many innocent creatures crashing to earth was as sinister an occurrence as I’d witnessed, at least since the war, and coming as it did, just as the man I’d known as Jeremiah Caine arrived, suggested something gravely portentous, as though the birds were reacting to the arrival of the Devil himself.

  ‘What the hell’s happening?’

  ‘The curse,’ said Preston. ‘I told you there was something malevolent here. Every February, on the night of the new moon, something possesses the birds passing over Jatinga. It makes them hurtle to earth and kill themselves.’

  And suddenly I remembered my scripture: the story of Legion, the demons cast out by Jesus into a herd of swine.

  And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and were choked in the sea.