Scarper Jack and the Bloodstained Room

by Christopher Russell

  The Assistant Commissioner spoke as mildly as before but Jack remained rigid, still clutching the kettle. Another lie. They hadn’t been together till well gone eight o’clock. Why was his father doing this?

  The visitors didn’t ask anything else. Jack stayed where he was until they’d gone, then turned. Bewildered. Angry.

  ‘Why did you say that, Father?’ he demanded. ‘I wasn’t with you all evening. You know I wasn’t. And the money. The gambling. You never–’

  ‘Listen!’ shouted his father, then he calmed visibly and spoke with great restraint, imparting wisdom. ‘Listen, Jack. The crushers never believe the likes of us. Never. Not even when we’re innocent. Especially when we’re innocent. So you’ve always got to have a story, an alibi. You never tell them what they want to know. You never tell them anything. That’s a lesson you’d better learn. And fast.’

  A gaggle of neighbours had gathered in the road. Constable Downing shoved them away from the carriage as Richard Featherstone and Colonel Radcliffe climbed in. Richard eventually broke the silence as the carriage trundled away. ‘So what is your opinion of Tolchard?’ Colonel Radcliffe shrugged non-committally. ‘We shall see. He smelt of drink. Men who drink too much always betray themselves in the end. Liquor loosens the tongue.’ He paused. ‘I wonder, sir, if you would consider offering a reward for information?’

  ‘So soon?’ asked Richard, surprised. ‘Surely those who have information can be trusted to come forward without money being dangled before their noses?’

  Colonel Radcliffe made no comment.

  Jack silently removed his vomit-stained clothes, making sure he took his gold sovereign from the trouser pocket, and put on his sweep’s rags instead. Then he slung his sweep’s sack over his shoulder and went downstairs.

  Out in the backyard, he raised water from the pump into a bucket and plunged the dirty clothes in to soak. As he walked off through the alleyway, his father appeared from the house, clutching the small card Richard Featherstone had given him.

  ‘Jack,’ he called. ‘Read this for me.’

  Jack kept walking as if he hadn’t heard. He didn’t want to speak to his father right now. Couldn’t, without asking him again about his lies.

  He was drawn to Calborn Gardens. Perhaps being there again would help. Perhaps he’d remember more of the overheard conversation; something new, something vital he could tell the police without having to explain that his father had lied; that they hadn’t been together for the whole of last night.

  The Shoreys’ house was at the end of the gracious terrace. A narrow side street flanked its side wall, and at the rear, at right angles to this, a backstreet ran the length of the terrace, with a high boundary wall enclosing the succession of small back gardens. Each property had its own back gate. The Shoreys’ house, being at the end, also had a gate into its garden from the side street. Wrought-iron fire escapes, smartly painted, zigzagged down from attic level to basement scullery at the back of every house.

  Calborn Gardens was empty. Its side street also. Jack found a section of the Shoreys’ side garden wall with slight imperfections in its stonework and climbed it, strong fingers and toes clinging to the crevices. From there he climbed a drainpipe to the roof and crouched beside the chimney stack where he’d rested yesterday. He sat for some minutes thinking hard, but nothing new occurred to him.

  Suddenly, he heard shouting. Jeering laughter and a stampede of feet. Looking down, he saw the Shoreys’ son running into the side street. A gang of other schoolboys was pursuing him from Calborn Gardens. In panic, the tall, well-built but pale-faced boy rushed to the side gate and turned its handle. The gate wouldn’t open. The ringleader of his tormentors called out to him.

  ‘Now, now, Rupe, don’t spoil the game. We only want to play.’

  Rupert tugged and twisted more desperately at the handle. Don’t cry, he pleaded with himself. Please don’t cry. But he knew he was going to. It was always them against him. He was always alone.

  ‘Fight!’

  Rupert heard a loud and urgent whisper somewhere above him.

  ‘Turn round and fight.’

  Rupert didn’t believe in guardian angels.

  ‘Fight!’

  He looked up and saw the sweep’s boy hanging from a drainpipe.

  ‘Go on!’ Jack jerked his free fist in demonstration of a right hook.

  Rupert had never mastered the right hook in boxing lessons. He didn’t even like hitting people. But he could hear the bullies close behind him now and he knew what game they wanted to play. It involved tearing his shirt and throwing his boots into distant gardens. He turned round blindly and swung his fist. The pain in his knuckles was awful as it connected but the shout from the ringleader, whose face he’d managed to punch, was quite unlike any sound he’d heard from him before. Rupert opened his eyes, saw blood, shock and sudden fear on the face in front of him, and windmilled forward, whirling his clenched fists like a machine and letting out what he was astonished to recognize as a savage roar. Some blows connected, most did not, but the battering was so violent and insistent and out of character that the bullies did what most bullies do when unexpectedly on the receiving end: they retreated. And when a skinny, ragged imp landed from nowhere beside the transformed Rupert, fists also clenched, they ran.

  ‘I’ve opened the gate,’ panted Jack. ‘Come inside before the neighbours make a fuss.’ And he pulled Rupert, whose arms were still involuntarily windmilling, backwards into the garden.

  When the Rupert Shorey fighting machine finally ground to a halt and he turned to thank the sweep’s boy, he’d disappeared. Rupert blinked and looked around and began to think he’d imagined the intervention, or that, possibly worse, it had indeed been supernatural. He hurried indoors and up to his room, avoiding the cook, the maid and his mother on the way. Upstairs he paused, calming himself down. His room overlooked the garden and the backstreet. He peered out. The sweep’s boy wasn’t in the garden or next door’s garden, or the backstreet either. Was he on the roof? Rupert hurried from his room and along the corridor to the fire escape. He pushed open the door and stepped outside on to the metal landing.

  Jack stifled a cry of surprise and jumped to his feet. He hesitated, not sure whether to bound up the iron staircase to the attic level or down towards the garden. Rupert was just as startled as he came face to face with his rescuer.

  ‘So this is where you are,’ he said, pointlessly, to cover his own nervous surprise. Then, as Jack moved to the flight of steps leading upwards: ‘No. Please don’t run away. I, um, want to thank you. For helping me down in the street.’

  He wanted to say more but didn’t know what.

  Jack shrugged. ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘I’m not quite as useless as I thought,’ said Rupert. He tried to clench his fists again but they were already too stiff and swollen. He pretended they didn’t hurt.

  Jack shrugged again and smiled. ‘You weren’t what I’d call stylish but you gave them something to think about.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rupert. ‘I did, didn’t I?’ He smiled uncertainly, then quickly continued. ‘Can I ask you a question? How did you do that yesterday? I saw you go up the chimney, and then you were on the roof. D’you turn into smoke or something?’

  ‘I’ll tell that secret,’ said Jack, ‘if you tell me who lives next door.’

  ‘Next door? Why?’

  ‘Just tell me.’ Jack was no longer smiling.

  Rupert hesitated. He owed this boy a lot but should he tell him about the neighbours?

  ‘I’m not a thief,’ Jack said sharply.

  Rupert blushed. ‘I didn’t say you were,’ he protested, but the sweep’s boy had guessed correctly what was in his mind.

  ‘I need to know,’ said Jack, ‘because of something I heard yesterday while I was up the chimney.’ He hesitated. ‘Something bad.’

  Rupert stared at Jack’s worried face and decided the boy was honest.

  ‘The neighbours are Mr and Mrs Knight,’ he
said. ‘But they’ve decamped to the country while the house is upside down.’

  ‘Upside down?’

  ‘Being painted. Well, when I say painted I don’t mean decorated, I mean painted. By an artist. Mrs Knight’s gone mad for murals, apparently. That’s paintings on the wall: I didn’t know either but Pa explained. It’s frightfully expensive but they paint whatever you like: clouds, mountains, ships at sea–’

  ‘So who is in the house?’ interrupted Jack.

  ‘Uh, the housekeeper. And one maid – the others have gone to the country. And the artist himself. Erskine his name is. He’s got his own room, to mix up his paints and do his sketches and things.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Where’s his room?’

  ‘Next to mine. I’ve heard him through the wall.’

  Jack sat and stared silently down through the grating of the fire escape, thinking hard. The voices had definitely come from the house next door, but which room? He tried to remember all the connecting flues inside the chimney and which way they went. In the end, he was certain.

  ‘Will you tell me what you heard?’ asked Rupert hesitantly. ‘What was bad about it?’

  Jack looked up. ‘I heard voices in that room, the painter’s room, planning a murder. At Nunwell Street.’

  Rupert’s mouth opened. He stared at Jack. ‘Not the murder?’

  Jack nodded. ‘So I went to Nunwell Street last night. And I got hit on the head.’

  Rupert could see the scabbing wound on the back of Jack’s head. It looked extremely painful.

  ‘You mean somebody bashed you? Gosh…!’ It seemed an inadequate comment but it was all Rupert could manage.

  ‘What’s he like?’ asked Jack. ‘Erskine. Young? Old?’

  ‘Quite young – and slim. Agile, I should think.’ Rupert paused. ‘D’you think he heard you in the chimney and followed you to Nunwell Street?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘I didn’t go straight there. I wandered around and tried to speak to the police. And anyway, being agile doesn’t mean you can climb on roofs. Especially in the dark.’

  Rupert nodded. ‘But,’ he persisted, ‘if Erskine and the person he was talking to realized they’d been overheard, you could be in danger, you know.’

  Jack slowly looked up. This hadn’t occurred to him. It wasn’t a nice thought.

  Rupert tried hard not to sound excited. This was shocking, dreadful. But rather thrilling too.

  ‘What were you actually doing on the roof when you got hit?’ he asked.

  Jack told him about the loose tiles.

  Rupert gave a long, low whistle.

  ‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘suppose Erskine and his friend had made a hole earlier – under the tiles. Suppose they came back and found you crouching over it. Well, they’d bash you, wouldn’t they? Especially if they realized you could have overheard them, being as how you’re a sweep. I expect they meant to kill you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jack, pretending he wasn’t growing more afraid by the moment.

  ‘I expect,’ said Rupert, thinking it through, ‘they made the hole bigger while you were knocked out, got through, killed Featherstone then got out of the same hole again and away. Did you look at the tiles when you woke up?’

  Jack had to admit that he hadn’t.

  ‘I think you should,’ said Rupert. Then he grinned, slightly embarrassed. ‘Of course, that’s easy for me to say.’

  Jack raised his eyebrows and nodded. It certainly was. It wouldn’t be this bubbling schoolboy taking the risk; it would be him.

  ‘But as for right now,’ resumed Rupert eagerly, ‘I know he often goes out in the afternoons.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Erskine. Why don’t we follow him? Or would you rather go to the police?’

  ‘No,’ said Jack hastily. ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘What’s he doing now?’ whispered Constable Adams, who’d been reassigned from his beat to assist in Nunwell Street. He and Constable Downing were in the hallway of number seventeen, peeping into Henry Featherstone’s office. The Assistant Commissioner was on his hands and knees, peering up the chimney.

  ‘This is what he does, apparently,’ muttered Downing, half impressed, half deeply sceptical. ‘Clues.’

  ‘Why not just bring in the caretaker and give him a proper pumping?’ asked Adams. ‘Then work his way up through the clerks and accountants. It’s obvious: someone’s had their hand in the till. Guv’nor’s twigged. Got bashed for his trouble. Obvious.’

  He knew it wasn’t obvious at all, but saying it kept at bay his nagging worry about the sweeping boy and the dream.

  Downing merely shrugged.

  Colonel Radcliffe was aware the men were watching him. He didn’t mind. The world was changing and the world of crime with it. New habits of detection needed to become ingrained. Example was the best teacher.

  He turned again to the bloodstains. There were many of them; now dried. On the floorboards, on the desk, the wall, a chair. The chair was the most interesting. It was the only dainty item in a room of sparse heavy furniture. It had been broken in the struggle. Someone had touched it with blood on their hands. Possibly Featherstone himself. Possibly the murderer.

  Colonel Radcliffe touched it himself now, carefully lifting one of its splintered legs between his fingertips and propping it on the window sill where it caught the light. He peered once more at its bloody marks.

  ‘There he goes!’ cried Rupert.

  They were watching from the window of his room. Jack, standing beside Rupert on a sheet of newspaper to catch any soot from his clothes, saw a youngish man in a long coat, wide-brimmed hat and yellow scarf swirl down the back garden path. The man opened the gate and strode away along the backstreet with a parcel under his arm.

  ‘Come on,’ said Rupert excitedly and he hurried from the room. Jack hesitated then followed.

  ‘Rupert?’ Mrs Shorey’s surprised voice came rather querulously up the stairs.

  Rupert halted abruptly and turned.

  ‘Go down the fire escape,’ he hissed at Jack. ‘I’ll meet you in the street.’

  Jack flitted away just in time before Rupert’s mother appeared.

  ‘What are you doing home at this time?’ she asked, frowning at her son.

  ‘Forgot my prep,’ said Rupert quickly. ‘Old Fergie sent me home for it. Just fetching it now.’

  He ran back to his room, grabbed the first book he could find and ran out again.

  ‘Bye, Ma.’ He attempted to bustle downstairs past her.

  ‘What on earth have you done to your hands?’ Mrs Shorey stared appalled at the swollen red bundles of finger.

  ‘Just fighting,’ replied Rupert, as if it were his regular pastime. He clattered away towards the front door.

  Mrs Shorey was too surprised to call him back. She wandered suspiciously into his room. And was further disconcerted by the grubby sheet of newspaper by the window.

  Jack was already in the backstreet behind Calborn Gardens. He turned as Rupert puffed up behind him. For some reason Rupert was clutching a book.

  Erskine was disappearing round the next corner. He was walking swiftly. It was hard to keep up and out of sight at the same time, but fortunately he didn’t look back.

  After about five minutes, he turned into what seemed to be a muddy dead end, a truncated roadway in which his way was barred by huge wooden hoardings. But Erskine seemed to know what he was doing. He squeezed between two of the hoardings and disappeared again.

  Jack and Rupert ran to the great wooden wall and peered through the narrow gap. Below them was a vast trench gouged out of the earth. And from the trench rose up a great latticework of steel girders and scaffolding, and the beginnings of brick retaining walls. A new railway cutting and a bridge.

  Erskine was clearly visible, his yellow scarf distinctive amongst the drab clothes of the workmen on the site. No one took any notice of his approach; certainly no one challenged him.

  He climbe
d a ladder and perched on a wide crosspiece, a long way above the ground, which braced the scaffolding on either side. Once settled, he unwrapped his parcel, which contained a large pad of paper, and began to draw, sketching the scene around him and the men labouring within it.

  ‘We need to get closer,’ said Jack. ‘I want to see him properly, so I’ll recognize him.’

  He and Rupert slipped between the hoardings and quickly ran down the slope of churned earth towards the nearest end of the scaffolding. Erskine, safe on his perch, was talking intently to a workman, a scaffolder erecting the next level of latticework above him. The scaffolder stepped confidently back and forth across the gaps between the narrow girders, balancing effortlessly despite the heavy metal bolts he was carrying.

  ‘Stay here,’ said Jack, and he slipped away from Rupert, in amongst the poles and planks and ladders, then began to climb.

  It was far easier than a drainpipe, let alone a chimney. Like scaling a tall tree on which all the branches were straight and sturdy. He was soon level with the scaffolder and looking down on Erskine himself.

  ‘Oi! What’s your game?’

  A foreman had spotted Jack and yelled at him.

  ‘Out of it! Scarper!’

  Jack scarpered. But not before Erskine had looked up and seen him.

  He was an observant man and noted every detail, from Jack’s bare feet to his ragged sweep’s clothing.

  4

  The Grapnel

  Jack and Rupert scrambled back up to the wooden hoardings, squeezed through and kept running, though nobody seemed to be chasing them. Eventually they stopped. Rupert was enjoying the adventure immensely, even though he was out of breath.

  ‘Well!’ he said. ‘That was interesting.’

  Jack had got a good look at Erskine’s face. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure they’d achieved much. And Erskine had got an equally good look at him.

  ‘He’s quite big,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how he could have been in the roof valley without me seeing him. And I would definitely have heard him climbing over from the next.’

  ‘You might not have heard that scaffolder. The one he was talking to. Did you see the way he was balancing? I bet he could sit on top of a church spire and eat his lunch.’