Bucket's List

by Gary Blackwood

  It’s reasonable to suppose, then, that he followed his man all the way to Lambeth before Neckless was aware of it. Or it might be that Neckless was aware of it, but didn’t let on, just played him along until they were in some dark, deserted street more suitable for an ambush. No, that doesn’t seem quite right, either. Though Neckless is no angel, Charley has never known him to be unduly violent; he’s not really the sort to bludgeon a copper so savagely, for no good reason. However, Charley knows someone who is. If he had to guess, he’d guess that Neck and Neckless have joined forces again.

  The newspaper article didn’t say exactly where Lochinvar’s unconscious body was found, but the route-paper does: Fentiman Road, next to Beaufoy’s Vinegar Yard. Well. Things are getting more interesting all the time. As it happens, Beaufoy’s is only a stone’s throw – well, for someone with a good arm, anyway – from Priestley’s Orphan’s Home.

  Charley concluded long ago that Neck must be holed up somewhere that no one would ever think to look for him; an orphans’ home seems an even more unlikely spot than a church or a monastery. But, to quote his mother again, ‘You just never know.’

  If he were still a copper, he’d have to do things by the rules, all open and aboveboard. He’d need to ask a magistrate for a search warrant and would no doubt be refused – after all, Reverend Priestley is a well-respected citizen, and Charley has no real evidence. His only recourse, then, would be to pay the Reverend a friendly visit and question him politely and learn nothing – in other words, show his hand before he’d even seen for himself what cards he was holding.

  Not that Charley didn’t bend or break the rules from time to time in his policing days, when it suited his purpose; usually he had something more to go on, though, than just a hunch, which is all he has now. But the beauty of being a private enquiry agent is that you can play your hunches and make your own rules – provided you don’t get caught.

  If, by some far-fetched chance, Charley is right and Priestley has been harboring a wounded fugitive all this time, he must have had some compelling reason. Did Neck threaten to harm the man or his orphan girls if he didn’t cooperate? Or is there some more complicated relationship between the two of them? Are they family? Lovers? – well, perhaps not, considering how Neck likes the ladies. Colleagues, then? That seems more likely. After all, Neck’s shattered shoulder blade must have healed months ago, and yet he hasn’t decamped to some safer stamping ground; something’s keeping him here. Suppose the lucrative enterprise he’s been boasting about somehow involves the Reverend?

  One odd fact has been nagging at the back of Charley’s mind ever since his previous visit to the orphans’ home – a very small fact, to be sure, and yet sometimes those are the most significant. It was the way Priestley refused to reveal the name and location of the family who took Audrey in. Charley didn’t make much of it at the time; he had no call to, and Priestley’s explanation seemed reasonable enough. But now he can’t help wondering whether the man was hiding something – something more than just a fugitive.

  Well, there’s only one way to find out, and it’s not by interrogating him. Charley whiles away an hour or so in a chop house over a plate of chicken curry – as fond as he is of beef, he sometimes likes a change, and the stuff isn’t bad. Neither, he’s gratified to discover, is the coffee. The bread is a bit chalky, though; no doubt it’s been bulked up with sawdust and plaster and whitened with alum. His campaign to improve the quality of Mocha was so successful, maybe he should tackle the adulteration of bread next – or adultery, as Miss Fairweather likes to call it. And, speaking of Miss Fairweather, there’s yet another situation he needs to do something about. But one thing at a time.

  Armed with a bull’s-eye lantern borrowed from the Lambeth station house, Charley conceals himself outside the orphans’ home at dusk and watches. Though he’s borrowed a set of handcuffs as well, he probably won’t get to use them. There’s very little chance that he’ll find Neck or Neckless here; you don’t maul a police constable and then hang about waiting to be caught. He could easily nab Priestley, who is closing up his office for the night, but what would be the point, since he has nothing on the man?

  Once it’s totally dark and all the orphans are abed, Charley puts to use another lesson he’s learned: if you’re somewhere you’re not supposed to be, act as though you belong there. As he’s strolling casually across the courtyard, two young women – cooks or cleaning girls, no doubt – emerge from the kitchens. He smiles, tips his hat, and bids them good evening; giggling, they go on their way.

  The lock on the door of the Reverend’s office is no match for Charley’s tools and expert touch. Perhaps he and the Scarecrow should put their heads together and devise a pick-proof lock; they’d make a fortune. Once inside, he lights the bull’s-eye lantern and adjusts the slide so it emits only a narrow beam.

  The bound ledger still sits atop the neatly organized desk, in the exact position it occupied on his previous visit. As with so many men of the cloth, Priestley’s notion of Paradise seems to be a world in which everything and everyone has a place and is kept in it. Charley turns to the page labeled DECEMBER and holds it up to the light. Audrey’s name appears on the 30th of the month, just as Priestley said, followed by the name of the couple who took her in: Mr and Mrs Stinson of Lancashire.

  Charley jots this scanty information in his notebook, then scans the other entries on the page. There are a surprising number of them – half a dozen in January alone. How on earth does Mr Priestley manage to place so many of his orphans in what he likes to call ‘good homes’? Are there that many good homes available? Or are some of them not actually all that good? Is it possible that the girls are not being adopted so much as apprenticed, or indentured?

  The entries themselves don’t tell him much: On January 10, Sarah Fowler was sent to live with a Mr and Mrs Quentin of Derbyshire; a fortnight later, Alice Ford was taken by Mr and Mrs Phoenix of Cheshire, Mary Godwin went off to Lancashire with Mr and Mrs Shipley, and so on. It all looks simple and straightforward enough – at first glance. But Charley is seldom content to glance at things just once; he’s found that, if you examine almost any series of events closely enough, a pattern emerges.

  This one is no exception. When he turns the page, he discovers that the entries there follow the same pattern: the adoptive families are spread about somewhat, but not nearly as widely or as randomly as you’d expect. The fact is, by far the greatest number are located in the North West counties.

  And here’s another fact that, though it may be totally coincidental and irrelevant, is nonetheless intriguing: The surnames of the families from Cheshire all begin with the letter P, and the Lancashire ones with either an S or an L. But what’s truly bizarre is that the Derbyshire couples all have names starting with a Q. If that’s not a pattern, Charley will eat – well, perhaps not his hat, but a loaf of plaster-and-alum-laced bread, at any rate. They’re clearly not genuine names; Charley’s guess is, they’re part of a code of some sort. The question is, what do they stand for?

  Charley once told Young Lochinvar – the poor, battered lad – that the most obvious answers are not always the right ones, or words to that effect. But it generally pays to start at the top of the scale of obviousness, at least, and work your way down. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when a person thinks of Derbyshire or Lancashire or Cheshire? Cotton mills, of course. Thousands of them.

  As anyone who has read Michael Armstrong: The Factory Boy or Helen Fleetwood: A Tale of the Factories is well aware, those mills have a long and dark history of employing children as young as five or six to perform the most dismal and dangerous tasks, working them to exhaustion and paying them next to nothing. But we allow ourselves to imagine that, with the passage of Fielden’s Act and the Factory Act, all that magically changed.

  Charley knows better. Though it may be true that sending government inspectors into the mills has improved conditions overall, the blokes naturally expend most of their time and effort on
the big conglomerations of factories in Manchester and Bradford and Leeds. The relatively small and scattered rural mills find it easier to skirt the law; they tend to have fewer child workers, anyway, since wages are better in the cities.

  When he was still with the force, Charley was sent to a village in Gloucestershire to help solve the murder of a mill owner. The man was so universally despised that practically every person in the parish was a possible suspect, but it turned out he’d been shot by the father of a ten-year-old boy who was killed in an accident a few months earlier.

  Ordinarily, the minders briefly shut down their machines, which are called spinning mules, every hour or so to allow the scavengers – invariably young children, because of their small size – to crawl beneath the thread sheets and gather up the loose cotton fibers. But of course lost time is lost money, so the owner had forbidden his employees to shut down, even for a minute. The unfortunate lad, apparently startled by a rat, made the fatal mistake of lifting his head a bit too high; it was caught between the roller beam and the carriage, and crushed.

  Charley learned from the gaffer in charge of the floor that, though it was certainly the most gruesome accident in recent memory, it was hardly the only one. There had been six incidents so far that year, most involving lopped-off fingers or hair pulled out by the roots, and nearly all involving children. None had been reported to the Factory Act inspectors.

  Since a boy or girl with missing fingers isn’t much use when it comes to piecing broken threads, they were let go, as were the ones who fell sick from typhus or bloody flux, or from breathing in all that cotton fly. Between injuries and illnesses and the exodus to the cities, the rural mills suffered a continual shortage of young workers. Adults just aren’t as useful; aside from the fact that their bodies are too big for scavenging and their fingers too thick and clumsy for piecing, they have an annoying tendency to complain, or even quit, if worked too long and hard. Unlike domestics, factory workers have little difficulty finding a job.

  As the number of mills has increased and more and more country folk have fled the countryside, the shortage has become even worse. So, if Charley were a mill owner – now there’s a sobering thought – how would he deal with such a dilemma? Mrs Bramble’s maxim comes to mind once again: Doan’t thou marry for munny, but goa wheer munny is. By the same token, if you want children, you mun goa wheer children are.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Charley has known a number of finicky people – in fact, he’s married to one – and he can’t imagine any of them being content with such a sparse and sketchy system of record-keeping. But perhaps Priestley keeps this ledger just for show, to reassure his benefactors that the orphan girls have a good chance of being placed in a real home. Unless Charley has seriously misjudged the man, somewhere in his well-ordered personal paradise is a more thorough account of those transactions.

  Picking the lock on the office door was mere child’s play; Charley can’t even think of a metaphor that describes how easy it is to break into the desk drawers. But alas, they contain nothing that’s the least incriminating, unless you count the flask of what smells suspiciously like sherry, or the small, poorly rendered sketches of young girls – is Priestley a frustrated artist, or merely a man with secret and unnatural desires? – or the lock of brown hair tied with a faded pink ribbon – no telling whom that might belong to. If Priestley keeps a more detailed history of some sort, he clearly doesn’t keep it here.

  Cursing softly, Charley locks the drawers and turns his attention again to the ledger. If only he had a better knowledge of the mills in the North West counties and precisely where they’re located, or if there were someone among his wide network of informants and acquaintances who had such knowledge, but … But perhaps there is. Didn’t Mr Mumchance once say that his ‘old man’ owned a woolen mill in Gloucestershire? In fact, Charley got the idea that young Geoffrey was employed there for a time, before his conscience got the better of him and he settled on being poor and poetic instead.

  He has no idea where Mumchance and his new bride reside – surely not in the vicinity of the glue and bone works, still? It’s just possible, however, that he may be able to catch his man at the offices of Household Words. It’s late in the day, but this close to publication the staff will likely be burning the midnight oil – well, the ten o’clock coal gas, at least.

  Though Shrewdness and Persistence have been the main contributors to Charley’s success, he’s well aware that Luck has played a major role. Like an old trouper, it enters now, right on cue. Not only does it provide a cab for him to hail, it ensures that Geoffrey Mumchance remains at his desk, making last-moment adjustments to his latest article – which concerns the lack of decent drinking water in certain areas of the city – until the inspector arrives.

  As Charley hoped, Mr Mumchance, having spent most of his young life in and around woolen mills, knows the most profitable ones, at least, by name and by reputation; they were, after all, his father’s main competitors. It takes only a few minutes of perusing Priestley’s ledger for him to confirm that the names of the ‘adoptive parents’ likely constitute some sort of code. ‘See here,’ he says, eagerly, clearly glad to be of help to the man who has helped him so much. ‘Most of the supposed families in Cheshire have names beginning with a P. I’ll wager that stands for the biggest mill in the county – Pembroke. And all those Q’s in Derbyshire; what could they mean but Quarrington’s?’

  Charley points his crooked index finger at the entry claiming that Audrey was taken in by the Stinsons of Lancashire. ‘What about this one?’

  ‘Stubbins Mill, no doubt. And the names with an L, they’ll be Levenside.’

  The entries in the ledger are so brief and matter-of-fact, and what they represent – helpless orphans sold into slavery, in effect – is so beastly that Charley is overcome by that stunned, sick feeling again, as if someone has knocked all the wind out of him. He’s tempted to set fire to the book, as people burn the infected clothing and possessions of a cholera victim. But the coppers will need it as evidence when Priestley is brought up before a judge – and Charley will make sure that happens. He also intends to see that the bastard doesn’t slip the noose, the way Hubbard and Neck and Lord Starkey did.

  There’s no great hurry to nab the Reverend, of course. He’s not likely to go anywhere. Charley returns the ledger to its accustomed place that same evening, so Priestley will have no idea that Charley is onto him. Besides, there are far more important matters to attend to.

  You might assume that the inspector’s primary concern is tracking down the villains who gave Mr Mull such a beating–and who, presumably, are doing Priestley’s dirty work for him. But no, he’s been on their trail for years; they, too, can wait another day or two. At the moment, all he can think about is finding Sarah Fowler and Alice Ford and Mary Godwin – and, above all, Rosa’s daughter, Audrey – and taking them home, before they’re taken to some potter’s field in a pasteboard coffin. Should he stumble upon Neck or Neckless in the process, so much the better.

  If there were any quick and practical means of getting to Lancashire other than the London and North Western Railway, Charley would surely take it. He doesn’t care to be reminded of Miss Fairweather and their journey together – or anything else they’ve done together, for that matter. He needs to concentrate on the task at hand. Miss Fairweather has always had a way of destroying his concentration, and the whole unsettling, unsettled business with Monty’s death and the maid’s disappearance has his mind in even more of a muddle.

  Charley likes to know as much as possible about whatever situation he’s walking into, so he’s brought along the only book about cotton mills that he could find on such short notice: His wife’s copy of North and South by Mrs Gaskell. Since one of the main characters runs a mill, Charley assumed it would contain some useful information. And so it does – but only if he were looking to learn about thwarted love affairs, which he certainly isn’t. Instead of describing working conditions at the mill,
Mrs Gaskell prefers to tell us about the workings of the heart:

  Mr Thornton stood by one of the windows, with his back to the door, apparently absorbed in watching something in the street. But, in truth, he was afraid of himself. His heart beat thick at the thought of her coming. He could not forget the touch of her arms around his neck, impatiently felt as it had been at the time; but now the recollection of her clinging defence of him seemed to thrill him through and through, – to melt away every resolution, all power of self-control, as if it were wax before a fire. […]

  Strong man as he was, he trembled at the anticipation of what he had to say, and how it might be received. She might droop, and flush, and flutter to his arms, as to her natural home and resting-place. One moment, he glowed with impatience at the thought that she might do this, the next, he feared a passionate rejection, the very idea of which withered up his future with so deadly a blight that he refused to think of it.

  ‘Bloody fool,’ Charley mutters, and flings the book aside. It’s going to be a long trip. He should have brought The History of Rome, or a few issues of Household Words. Back when he was walking a beat, he’d pass the time by humming music hall tunes or singing them under his breath – it wouldn’t do to belt them out and tip off the thieves. He tries that now, but it, too, puts him in mind of Miss Fairweather. He’s even more of a bloody fool than Mrs Gaskell’s hero.

  At least he has his pipe, and the compartment all to himself. Luckily, though it’s well past sunrise, the conductor hasn’t yet extinguished the oil lamp, so it’s easy enough to light up. Then he takes out his notebook and reviews the information he copied from Priestley’s account book the night before. He didn’t think it wise to make off with the actual ledger; if the Reverend noticed its absence, it might spook him. The first place he’ll investigate is Stubbins Mill in Blackwater. It’s been over four months since Audrey was ‘adopted;’ he can only hope that she’s still there and still safe and sound. She’s a sturdy girl, and a clever one, but those qualities are no proof against accidents or abuse or disease.