The shop assistant smiled helpfully at Rupert and tried to ignore the unwashed little girl who appeared to be with him.
‘Yes, young man?’
‘I’m a friend of Hugo Erskine’s,’ announced Rupert.
‘Oh, really?’ The shop assistant beamed. ‘A very nice gentleman and a splendid artist.’
‘Yes, indeed. D’you by any chance remember him calling here three days ago? On Tuesday the ninth?’
He should remember, thought Rupert. Erskine spent a lot of money on Siberian mink brushes.
‘And why would you want to know that?’ The assistant was still smiling.
Rupert hadn’t thought of a reason.
‘Mr Erskine’s lost his pocketbook,’ said April behind him. ‘This is the last shop he can remember having it in.’
‘Oh dear,’ said the assistant, and immediately set himself to think. ‘Well, yes, he was here on Tuesday but I’m sure he had his pocketbook when he left. He certainly didn’t leave it.’
‘Did he have a friend with him?’ asked Rupert.
The assistant frowned briefly. ‘A friend?’
‘Yes,’ said Rupert eagerly. ‘Can you describe him?’
The assistant looked at Rupert, a hint of suspicion on his face. ‘No, I can’t. Mr Erskine was perfectly alone as usual.’
The doorbell jangled and a new customer came in.
‘If you’ll excuse me…’ said the assistant.
‘Um… if you could possibly remember the exact time,’ stumbled Rupert, ‘it would help Mr Erskine a lot.’
Jack slipped easily through the market, merging with the crowd. Dusk was finally approaching. Soon the great flares would be lit, giving a glow of magic to the business of buying and selling and picking pockets. The street performers looked better at night too: their costumes less threadbare and tawdry; their tricks and skills more breathtaking.
Jack suddenly stopped. There ahead of him was Erskine himself, seated amongst a group of other artists. Erskine looked up and Jack drew hastily back into the shadows behind a market stall, cursing himself for being careless. Surely Erskine must have seen him; Jack was certain there’d been a reaction, if only slight. But Erskine calmly resumed mixing paint on his palette.
Eventually, Jack edged away behind the stalls and continued by a different route. He didn’t see the short, muscular man detach himself from the group around the artists and begin to follow. Jack looked back frequently to make sure there was no one on his trail. Each time, his pursuer sensed the movement and slid out of sight.
When Jack reached Nunwell Street, he found only one policeman on duty, standing sentry outside the door of number seventeen. The face under the tall hat seemed vaguely familiar but Jack didn’t recognize Constable Adams.
Adams hated sentry duty. Officially, protecting the crime scene was a very important job. Unofficially, it was eight hours of boredom and discomfort. The night stretched numbingly ahead. It wasn’t even dark yet. He had decided he would walk up and down every fifteen minutes, to relieve the monotony. A church clock struck the quarter and he turned sharply away from his spot outside the front door, marching left along Nunwell Street. Behind him at the other end of the street, a slight figure flitted across towards the rear of the building.
Jack paused by the now familiar drainpipe, listening and watching, making sure he was alone; then climbed quickly, anxious that he’d waited too long and would end up groping around inside the building in the dark.
On the roof he stopped, calming himself. Slow down. Take your time. Don’t get careless.
Suddenly, he thought he heard a sound below, at the foot of the drainpipe. He froze. Listened… Nothing. He crept slowly back to the roof edge and peered over. There was nothing to see in the shadows below. Nothing to see and nothing to hear. Calm down. Calm down. You’ll fall. Nerves were as dangerous as haste. He picked his way up to the first roof ridge and sat astride it for a moment, listening again. Still nothing. He slid silently down into the first roof valley, then up and over into the second. He heard no noise except an occasional cough from the lone policeman.
When he reached the valley above number seventeen, Jack found the broken and loose roof tiles as he’d left them. He lifted the tiles carefully aside, hesitated a moment, then dug his fingers into the rotten wood and fabric that lined the inside of the roof. When he’d made a hole, he peered down through it into the space beneath, a kind of attic or loft, with wooden joists and a lot of dust and cobwebs. He made the hole bigger and, without a backward glance, eased himself down through and into the building.
Balanced, cat-like on the roof ridge behind him, a figure watched until Jack had disappeared, then edged softly down into the valley after him.
It was hot and windowless in the roof space. And dark. Jack searched the floor with his hands and found the loft hatch, just a square wooden lid, and lifted it out. Light of a kind entered from below. There was no ladder. Jack squatted for a second on the edge of the hole, then swung himself down and dropped lightly on to the first-floor landing. He paused for a moment, visualizing exactly where on the roof he had found the grapnel and where the window below it was positioned. It should be behind the door to his right. Cautiously, he pushed the door open. And there it was. He was looking directly at a sash window. The sash window. It was shut now but it had to be the window his father had left unlocked, the window the murderer had climbed through.
Jack padded over to it. Yes, it had exactly the same type of locking bar as those in Rupert’s house. He peered out briefly at the ground below. It would have been easy enough to throw a grapnel from there to the gutter above. He glanced quickly around the room. It was an office store with cabinets and cupboards but nothing else. He suddenly felt reluctant to go further, to trace the steps of the murderer and actually see the place where it had happened. He took a deep breath and went out on to the landing again, then walked slowly down the staircase to the ground floor.
The street door was straight in front of him. Jack paused for a moment, listening to the policeman’s cough. It sounded frighteningly close. Because of it, he didn’t hear the brush of clothing against wood, the light sound of breathing as someone bigger than himself squirmed through the hole into the roof space high above.
The office door was open. Jack made himself go in. He recoiled slightly in the doorway, shocked by the amount of blood. It was dry now, soaked darkly into the wood of the floorboards, desk and skirting board. Could his father really have known this was going to happen?
Jack tried to concentrate on his task, his reason for coming. He thought he could see a fingerprint in the bloodstains on the skirting board. He took out the precious scrap of canvas from inside his shirt and crouched to look closer.
There definitely was a fingerprint on the skirting board, but when he held the canvas against it he found comparison impossible. He shifted his position, but there was so little light now he still couldn’t see properly. He was on his hands and knees, his nose almost on the skirting board, trying desperately to compare the prints, when he heard the sound. Not outside, not the policeman coughing. Inside. On the stairs.
Jack held his breath. He remained perfectly motionless, hoping he’d imagined it. Then he heard it again: the lightest footstep and pause. After a few seconds, another. Someone was descending the stairs, very slowly, stealthily. Stopping and listening. Trying to locate him.
Jack glanced around the office. There was only the one doorway. Unless he moved now he would be cornered, trapped. He thought fleetingly of banging on the window, or running to the front door and calling to the policeman for help. That might save him but only if the policeman was very quick. He tried to envisage the back of the building. There were windows on the ground floor. He had to make for one of them. Still clutching his scrap of canvas, he slowly straightened up. Then, like a rabbit, he bolted.
As he flashed down the hallway towards the back of the building, Jack glimpsed a dark shape on the stairs. But only for a second. The figure vault
ed the banister and landed in front of him with the grace and menace of a wild animal. Jack stifled a cry of terror and crashed blindly past. He hurtled through the nearest open doorway and slammed the door behind him. There was no key in the lock. He vaulted across a table in the middle of the room and shoved it hard back against the door and leant against it. He heard a voice outside, cursing.
The door strained and rattled as the man outside put his shoulder to it and pushed. Jack knew he wouldn’t be able to hold the table for more than a few seconds. He turned desperately back into the room. It was a caretaker’s store with buckets and mops and piles of cleaning rags. And a window: a small fixed pane set in the wall, with no means of opening it. Jack grabbed a bucket and crashed it against the sealed glass. It shattered noisily but as the cascade of glass hit the ground outside, he also heard the sound of the table scraping back and the door bursting open. His pursuer was in the room. Jack turned momentarily and stared into the face of the man who had tried to strangle his father.
The bucket was still in Jack’s hand. He hurled it at the man, who ducked and threw up his arms as the bucket glanced off the side of his head before bouncing and clattering away.
In the few precious moments he had gained, Jack seized a handful of cleaning rags and dumped them on the jagged glass in the window frame, then dived headfirst through. He cried out as he felt the man’s powerful fists close round his ankle, but kept dragging himself out, writhing and kicking with his free foot. Then he felt the man’s grip suddenly loosen as his hands were pulled by Jack’s weight across the slicing remains of glass.
Jack fell in a heap on hard ground. His arms were bleeding but there was nothing he could do about that. He could hear shouting and the vigorous clacking of a policeman’s rattle. His assailant loomed in the gaping window space above him. Jack rolled away, got to his feet and ran.
Constable Adams had been about-turning at the far end of Nunwell Street when he’d heard the commotion. At first it didn’t occur to him that it could be happening inside the very building he was supposed to be guarding. But as he paced rapidly back towards number seventeen and on past the front door, the possibility seized him and he raised the alarm, springing his rattle and shouting for assistance.
Racing round the corner towards the back, he collided heavily with something small and fast. A boy. A boy he vaguely recognized. Adams grabbed at his hand but it was slippery with blood and the boy wriggled free. There was someone else in the lane behind number seventeen as well, running off in the opposite direction.
‘Take that one!’ roared Adams to the two beat policemen who had answered his rattle, and he raced off in pursuit of Jack.
Constable Adams knew now who the boy was. The whiff of soot from his clothes had given him away. The prophetic sweep’s boy. Had that been his father with him? Why were they here?
Adams’ knees and lungs were beginning to hurt but he didn’t slow down. This was the catch he wanted. This would redeem him fully. He did his best to keep the boy in sight, and when he lost him briefly, there was a trail of blood to follow.
Jack dodged down alleyways and clambered over walls but he couldn’t shake the policeman off. And Jack’s ankle was beginning to slow him. It was cut and twisted from his escape through the window. He wanted to climb, to get on to a roof, but he wasn’t far enough ahead, never out of sight for long enough.
Then, abruptly, he was in a dead end and he panicked until he realized he was at the railway workings where he and Rupert had followed Erskine and seen the scaffolder.
Jack eased between the hoardings and stumbled, then rolled down the muddy slope. He lay panting for a moment, then the hoarding creaked as the policeman also squeezed through. The site was dark and empty. No workmen or artists. Only the huge bare skeleton of ironwork. Jack crawled towards it and then climbed until he reached the highest level, and there became part of the skeleton himself, lying with his body flat and thin along a narrow scaffold board.
Constable Adams picked his way across the mud and rubble of the site. He was sweating and breathing hard, and wasn’t sure the boy had come this way. He struck a lucifer and lit his lantern. Its beam probed the ironwork but showed him nothing. Not even spots of blood.
‘Come out, if you’re here, boy,’ he called as sternly as he could while out of breath.
Nothing moved.
Adams started to climb a ladder but his muddy boots slipped on the rungs and he fell back again, painfully. He hesitated, made a reluctant decision, and hobbled away.
‘I don’t think he’s coming.’
It had been a bad day and Rupert feared the worst.
‘We didn’t say a time,’ said April doggedly.
They stood on the fire escape in silence for a while longer, straining their eyes towards the garden wall, but no one climbed nimbly over it.
‘Look,’ said Rupert awkwardly. ‘I’m going to have to go in. My pa will be home at any minute and he always does the locking up. Maybe you should go home to your gran.’
‘Maybe.’ April shrugged, still reluctant.
‘We’ll try the flat roof in the morning,’ suggested Rupert. He paused. ‘I’ll bring some food.’
April eventually looked at him and nodded. ‘All right.’
They crept down to the garden and Rupert let April out of the side gate. There was no point in doing otherwise but he felt guilty closing it behind her.
He’d almost made it to his room when he heard his father arrive in the hallway down below, just home from a business dinner.
‘Traffic was solid,’ Mr Shorey announced to his wife. ‘Police everywhere. They’re not saying much but there’s been more goings-on at Nunwell Street.’
‘Nunwell Street?’
‘Featherstone’s place. Apparently they’re after a sweep’s boy.’
‘A sweep’s boy? Whatever for, dear?’
‘What for? Murder, of course. Whoever he is, they think he’s in it up to his neck.’
Rupert shrank into his room.
9
The Painting
Seventeen Nunwell Street was now full of light. The gas lamps had all been lit and lanterns swayed and flashed in the darker corners of the building. Colonel Radcliffe was already there by the time Constable Adams limped back.
‘It was definitely him, sir. Definitely the sweep’s boy.’
Colonel Radcliffe was perplexed. Why on earth would the boy return to the scene of the crime? Except that it was commonly believed that murderers often did. In a macabre way it made more sense of the boy’s initial approach to Adams, with talk of a dream. Perhaps he had known he was going to kill and wanted to be stopped. That was not unknown either. Colonel Radcliffe tried to shake off such fanciful ideas. He had seen the boy, and the father, three mornings ago. He was sure they were implicated in some way but far from sure they could have personally killed Featherstone.
‘And no trace at all of the other man?’
He’d already asked Constable Downing the question once.
‘Afraid not, sir,’ came the patient reply. ‘He had too much of a start on us. Once he got to the courts and back doubles, that was it. Disappeared into the warren.’
‘Anything missing?’
‘Not that we can tell, sir. Looks like they got in through the roof and out through the back window. Why they made such a noise, I couldn’t say.’
Nor could Colonel Radcliffe. All he could do was redouble his efforts to track down the Tolchards.
Jack lay stiff as a scaffold board for a long time after he thought the policeman had gone. So long that he drifted into a shallow sleep. He woke in a panic, knowing that he couldn’t hide where he was indefinitely and unsure how much of the night had passed.
Whatever the time was, it was far too late to go to Rupert’s house now, so in the end he decided to make his way to the flat roof instead. Perhaps the others would come looking for him there.
He arrived at dawn and, glancing towards the Jevons’ yard, felt an ache of nostalgia. Only
a few days ago he would have been waking there now, with no fear of the day ahead.
His damaged ankle protested sharply as he climbed the rickety wooden stairs but on reaching the roof he stopped, not in pain but surprise. April and Rupert were already there.
‘Where have you been, Jack?’ asked April, shocked by his appearance.
Jack slumped down without answering and sat looking up at them for a moment. ‘Why are you both here so early?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been here all night,’ said April.
‘And I couldn’t sleep,’ said Rupert, staring at Jack’s gashed arms and bloody ankle. ‘What’s happened to you?’
Jack shrugged. ‘Erskine saw me in the market. I think he had me followed. The same thug who tried to kill my dad. He tried to kill me too.’
April and Rupert glanced at each other, then back at Jack. Then April hurried to the edge of the roof. ‘Stay where you are,’ she commanded and disappeared. She came back a few minutes later with some damp cotton rags.
‘From Mrs Jevons’ washing line,’ she explained. ‘Only borrowed.’ And without giving him time to protest, she began to clean and bind Jack’s ankle. He was embarrassed by the attention.
‘Sit still,’ she commanded. ‘At least you don’t smell of sick this time.’
‘Well?’ asked Rupert impatiently.
‘I went to Nunwell Street,’ explained Jack. ‘That’s where he caught me. But the worst thing is, I couldn’t match Erskine’s fingerprint. It was too dark to see. So we’re no nearer proving him guilty.’
There was an odd silence.
April concentrated on tying knots in rags. Eventually, she looked up at Rupert. ‘You tell him,’ she said.
‘Tell me what?’ Jack looked sharply from one to the other.
Rupert cleared his throat. ‘April and I went to the shop.’
Scarper Jack and the Bloodstained Room Page 10