The Cunning House

by Richard Marggraf Turley

  Brockton? Hadn’t his desk been cleared? Cavendish was a different matter. He was old school, not easily alarmed.

  “What did Cooke say to them?”

  “Refused t’ say a word. Wanted the Secretary.”

  “Surely Mr Cavendish didn’t take him seriously?”

  The clerk winked. “Had him whisked off, right there an’ then, sir, under armed guard. That’s where it ’appened, outside his lordship’s mansion, right at the gates. Right at the gates, Mr Wyre.”

  “Was the assassin taken?”

  “Nah. Guards said the shot seemed t’ come from everywhere at once, but I reckon it must ’av been popped off from one of the roofs opposite. That’s where’d I’d hunker down. Used t’ be a Green Jacket in the 7th. Me an’ me Baker rifle, pride of the regiment. Before the arm, that was.” He flapped his stump. “Shooter got his slug away, saw blood on Cooky’s forehead . . .” The clerk flicked open the fingers of his clenched hand like a little detonation. “Must’ve thought his job was done, then legged it. We leave it to others t’ take the glory, us sharpshooters. What he weren’t to know was the bullet got lodged in that thick skull o’ Cooky’s.”

  “He knew the landlord was coming,” Wyre said in a quiet voice, thinking of that cool voice in the service tunnel.

  “Looks that way, sir, don’t it? Tip-off, as yer might say. One of them fancy bum-funners of yours, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Wyre frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Cooky was blethering on ’bout his ledger. That’s what he calls his list of names. He’s in the extortion business, mark my words. Seems someone took exception.”

  “Where’s the landlord now?”

  “Back in his cell. Sat up blusterin’ all night. Doctor took twelve ounces of blood. But he’s quiet enough now. Sleeping it off. Smells like a ship’s surgeon. Doctor says to leave ’im. Either he’ll wake up, or he won’t.”

  Wyre cursed under his breath. Another attempt on a Vere Street man’s life. The picture was acquiring a disturbing singleness. He needed to talk to Leighton.

  There was something else to consider, too: things suddenly looked a lot worse for Aspinall. It stretched credulity to suppose the mad-doctor’s disappearance was unconnected from the events of last night. Poor Miss Crawford, she didn’t deserve any of this. He gave the clerk a firm look. “Tell Suter I wish to know the instant Cooke comes to his senses.” He dug in his pocket for a half-crown he could ill afford to dispense. “Make sure I’m the first to know. Before Brockton, you understand?”

  “Won’t get no logic out of ’im, Mr Wyre,” the clerk said, pocketing the coin. “Cooky’s lost his pebbles.”

  “Come with me, while we’re at it,” Wyre said. “I’ve something for you to deliver to the Public Office.” He led the clerk to his office, where he scribbled a quick note to Leighton, asking to meet the Runner at midday. The Wheatsheaf, this time. He’d be giving The Sun a wide berth from now on. As the one-armed man turned to go, Wyre asked, “Where’s Brockton now? Didn’t Best send him packing?”

  “Oh, that he did, Mr Wyre,” the clerk said over his shoulder, “up to th’ second floor. Risen in th’ world, is our Mr Brockton.”

  Wyre stared. It was time to have a word with the fat toad.

  Brockton’s office had its own brass nameplate. Wyre rapped sharply.

  “Come.”

  The adenoidal tone was unmistakable. His colleague’s room had a fair view over the chimney-tops.

  Wyre launched right in. “You might as well know I’ve been through the Vere Street transcripts.”

  “A complex case.” Brockton’s face betrayed nothing. “It already feels historical.”

  “Was Wardle your informant? Why didn’t you mention him to me?”

  “He came forward at the last minute. After you were taken ill,” Brockton added, smiling.

  “And he failed to show up on his big day.”

  There was no answer to that.

  “Twenty-seven culprits, all taken in the act – and the net result? Five pilloried men.”

  “I suppose there’s a purpose to all this,” Brockton said.

  “Defending the Vere Street gang was Mitchell’s domain. How did you end up in the advocate’s role?”

  “Mitchell was seconded to Crown business in the Principality. It wasn’t possible to find another lawyer prepared to represent filth. I did my duty.”

  Wyre looked around the office. “Seems you’ve been rewarded for it.”

  He turned. There seemed no point in further comment.

  Nothing from Leighton. There wasn’t any good news about Cooke, either. Still comatose. The hulking gaoler corroborated the clerk’s report – the doctor didn’t expect the White Swan’s landlord ever to be compos again. There was nothing to be gained by hanging around the Courthouse, so Wyre left for The Wheatsheaf, trusting Leighton would turn up.

  He took The Chronicle with him, refamiliarizing himself as he walked with the details of the assault on the Duke of Cumberland, placing the details in space. Two shabby trees became Sellis the faithless valet and Thomas his conniving correspondent. The more he read, the less convinced he was that a jury could wrap up the inquest in a single week. Too many moving parts. The principal evidence against Sellis appeared to be entirely circumstantial, boiling down to little more than a pair of slippers. What kind of would-be murderer left his slippers at the scene of a crime, his name absurdly stitched in the lining?

  He turned from the first scrubby tree to the other. Sellis – dupe or mastermind?

  If there was an upside, it was that he had a chance to make good in Best’s eyes. If Vere Street really had gestated a plot to kill a royal, the case would have to be reopened. This time it wouldn’t hinge on punishing sodomites, but had all the makings of a full-blown sedition trial. Though that depended on finding some of the principal players still breathing. It looked like Cooke could be counted out. That left the other pilloried men: the guardsman, waiter and customs officer. Odd as it sounded, his best bet probably lay with Aspinall: there was a connection he could exploit through Miss Crawford.

  He picked a third tree, a lime, its leaves caked with white dust, to stand in for the other man mentioned in the report, the manservant who’d discovered Sellis weltering in blood. Neale. That was another thing that made no sense. Why the devil hadn’t the fellow . . .

  The Wheatsheaf’s four-bay façade hove into view. Wyre looked for Leighton’s dandy-charger, half-expecting to find it strapped to a downpipe. It wasn’t there.

  The air in the tavern’s back room was charged with the words ‘assassination’ and ‘Frenchie bastards’. Wyre’s poor imitation of Leighton’s hooked finger eventually caught the attention of a barmaid, who leaned across the bar, hair hanging in loose ringlets. Wyre ordered two mugs of hot beer.

  At half past one, there was still no sign of Leighton. Giving up, he took a mouthful of beer and pushed himself to his feet. It was a long shot, given Leighton’s itinerancy, but he’d try the Runner at the Public Office.

  No. 4 Bow Street, Leighton’s circus. The non-descript high stone building with its single chimney had always struck the lawyer as at mundane odds with the extravagant behaviour that represented its stock-in-trade. He squeezed into an entrance corridor packed with short-weight bakers, disorderly apprentices, fortune-tellers, harlots, pork butchers and card-sharps. Wyre presented himself to the desk sergeant.

  Mr Leighton ’adn’t bin in that day. Weren’t in yesterday, neither. What weren’t unusual. “When he’s got th’ scent, Mr Wyre. When he’s got th’ scent!”

  Surely, the lawyer reflected, Leighton would have seen Sellis’s name in the papers by now. He’d be as eager to make contact as Wyre was, especially given the Crispin Street intelligence they shared. After all, they were in possession of information that linked the Palace manservant Sellis to the Vere Street mollies.

  “I’ll tell ’im you were ’ere, sir.”

  On an impulse, Wyre asked the desk sergeant ab
out the officer named in The Post, the one who’d dragged those military turdmen, ensign Hepburn and the drummer-boy White, up from the Isle of Wight.

  “Rivett, sir?” The sergeant called over a wispy-cheeked officer, and with a wink instructed him to show Wyre up.

  Rivett’s desk was under a tiny back-facing window.

  “Mr Wyre from the Courthouse, sir,” announced the young officer.

  The Runner turned, presenting a portrait of unshaven cheeks and sensual mouth, unpleasant gaps between the snaggle teeth. Nothing of the patriot-flame.

  “Mist-a Wy-ah . . . from the Court’ouse,” he parroted in broad city.

  “Are you the one who brought in the drummer-boy?” (Rivett regarded him steadily.) “I’m interested in the man who informed on him.”

  “Oh, it’s all up wi’ Whitey boy,” Rivett said. “No ’elp fer ’im nah.” The man seemed constitutionally adverse to a straight answer.

  “White will get a fair trial,” Wyre said, resenting the implication.

  “Yer fink?” Rivett sneered. “Shoulda seen th’ bastard when I got the drop on ’im. Filled his breeches, an’ who can blame ’im?”

  Wyre ignored that. “The papers say a Palace servant put the finger on White. What was his name?”

  Rivett’s eyes slid away from the lawyer’s as from the repulsing poles of a magnet. “Never met him. We wuz jus’ told the identification had been made.”

  “At least give me the man’s name.”

  “It wuz an alias. Told t’ use it at all times.”

  “Is that usual?”

  “Depends . . .” Rivett smirked. “Dunno much, do yer?” He exchanged a grin with the young officer.

  “Well, then, tell me what his alias was.” Wyre’s tone became sharper.

  Rivett looked the lawyer up and down. “Dunno as I’m under any obligation to answer yer interrogations. But the alias ain’t no secret. Funny name, but then they usually are. Mr Parlez-Vous. That’s what we wuz told t’ call him.”

  “Who stands behind that cypher? Listen, there may be a great deal at stake.”

  “Nah, Mr Wyre,” Rivett said with a slow shake of his head. “Even if I knew.” He lifted his upper lip. Those dark gaps again.

  Wyre returned to the Courthouse via the Strand. The heat was beyond. He passed the new St Clement’s church, which gleamed in the sun. Tiny lanes began there to fan out north, splitting off into further avenues, one of which eventually became Vere Street.

  Mr Parlez-Vous. It was an unpromising starting point. Wyre traipsed up the Courthouse’s grand steps; at the entrance, he was flagged down by the clerk. It seemed Cooke wasn’t dead, after all.

  Wyre never looked forward to his descents into Suter’s stygian realm, but this one might be worth it. The head turnkey led him to the landlord’s cell, and Wyre put his face to the barred upper portion of the door. It smelled as if something had gone off. The landlord was sprawled on a straw bed facing the wall. Seeming to sense Wyre’s disturbing presence, he pushed himself up into a sitting position. Slowly, his head turned. One eye was caked shut with blood, the other darted wildly, coming at last to rest on the lawyer.

  “Suter!” he roared. “Get him away! He’s come to eat me.”

  “Calm yourself, you mad bastard. This is Mr Wyre, one of the lawyers here.”

  The gaoler unlocked the heavy door, and Wyre entered warily. The putrefying miasma was a physical thing that had to be pushed into, heart and lungs. The landlord’s condition was patently precarious. His black hair was sodden and hung lankly, one cheek was buff leather, and his breathing came laboured as if each inhalation was raising a weight. But most shocking was the penny-sized hole above his right eye where a portion of skull was missing. Something Wyre didn’t want to think about glistened there.

  Cooke put his head at a grotesque angle. “Did Sarah send yer? Daft bitch is lost to me anyway. Brockton’s had five pounds off her, and God knows what else.”

  “Tell me about last night.”

  “Job half-done . . . Yer talking to a dead man. Best don’t mean for me to leave this place on my feet.”

  Wyre frowned deeply. “What’s Mr Best in this?”

  Cooke’s look became sly. “Only the worst banger of foreign dung-holes. What in th’ trade we call a regular.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Wyre cast a glance back through the bars at Suter, who made a throat-cutting motion.

  “Promised to bring me through, if I kept me clam shut.” The landlord began to whine, his sensual lips widening. “Head o’ the sect, Mr Wyre, the Mother of all Mollies.”

  Wyre ignored him. “Who shot at you? It’s in your interest to tell me.”

  The landlord’s swollen face seemed to collapse in on itself. “Ask Suter.” He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. “There’s a man who tells less than he knows.”

  “Speak plainly. I can’t help you otherwise.”

  “Fink I’m beyond your ’elp now, Mr Wyre.” He squinted over the lawyer’s shoulder. “When I wus carried back yesterday, Suter forgot ’imself. ‘Cooky’, says he, ‘What the devil are you doin’ here? It weren’t meant for you to come back’. Go on, Mr Wyre, ask him.”

  Wyre sensed Suter’s bulk shifting behind the bars of the door.

  “There’ll be time for allegations of that nature,” the lawyer said. “First, I want your list of clients. Who were the habitual men? That’s what you went to tell the Secretary, isn’t it?”

  Cooke touched a finger to the missing circle of bone on his forehead. “Funny thing, Mr Wyre, it don’t hurt.” He fixed the lawyer with his single good eye. “I saw a six-foot grenadier take a little master ’arf his size, three or four couples in the same room riding each other like rams.” A slop of something slid out of the hole, which he wiped away with the pad of his forefinger. “Word got round, see. Weren’t long before the cits rolled up in their fancy coaches. Tipping an ’od-carrier a guinea meant nothing to ’em, jus’ so long as they got to squeeze a nice fat, healthy yard.”

  “Their names, man.”

  Cooke’s face grew cunning. “Everyone wants those. The White Swan was never just about arse, see, Mr Wyre. Those pegos thought they was customers, but they was jus’ names to be sold on. Still are, if I understand Mr Brockton’s game. Should’ve had Yardley’s sense, melted away at the first signs of trouble like ice on a milliner girl’s gash.” He grinned. “Eh, Mr Wyre? Some of ’em were worthless, mind. Miss Sweet Lips was a waiter, Mistress Fox a sawyer. The better men, tho’, yer Kitty Cambrics an’ Lady Godivas, yer Black-eyed Leonoras. That’s a different story. Bankers’ sons, ’onrable Members. Even ’ad a sub-librarian at the London Institution. Higher than that, maybe.” His look became sly again. “Oh, it was a club wi’ reach.”

  Wyre straightened. “If crimes have been committed, it’s my job to see them prosecuted. Rank won’t protect anyone, you have my word.”

  Cooke’s good eye suddenly flared. “Cut their sacks off, Mr Wyre, it’s the only way, or yer’ll never make decent citizens of ’em.” A strange noise brewed in his throat, starting low and rising.

  The door scraped open behind the lawyer.

  With a firmness that took Wyre aback, Suter ushered him out into the tight passage. “For your own protection,” the gaoler said.

  So there was nothing to be expected from Cooke. But the day had at least provided one new thread to pull – Rivett’s allusion to his Palace source, to this ‘Mr Parlez-Vous’.

  He needed to know more about him. He needed to know more about everything.

  It was time to try Leighton at his lodgings.

  What it pleased Leighton to call his ‘whereabouts’ was situated in a haveless part of town, not far from Cheapside’s own unambitious streets with their covered ways and yards. Wyre stepped into the dark building, passing the Runner’s yellow hobby horse in the hall. Picking his way through the doe-eyed trulls who slouched or slept on the stairs, Wyre climbed up to a narrow first-floor landing, and followed the apartments a
long to No. 17. The door was ajar. Faint voices could be heard inside. Wyre knocked; when there was no reply, he entered, half-expecting to find the Runner in a clinch.

  He wasn’t prepared for the smell, worse than Cooke’s cell, somewhere between sweetness and pungency, and it was getting stronger. Wyre squeezed past Leighton’s tasselled sofa to reach the back cubbyhole that served his friend as a drawing-room-cum-study. Two men were conversing there. The shorter one had his back to the door, the other stood side-on; tall, with elegant wire-framed glasses held on by a coloured ribbon.

  Two Bow Street officers in distinctive blue garb were busily pulling books off Leighton’s shelves.

  Leighton himself sat slumped at the writing desk, his face contorted, neck a spider’s nest of scratch marks. It looked as if the phlegm was still boiling in his throat.

  38. Symptoms of Death

  The stocky one was the Middlesex Coroner, a pinched man under the burden of the name Solomon.

  “When did you last see the deceased?” he asked bluntly.

  “About a week ago,” Wyre replied numbly, eyes fixed on Leighton’s hunched form. “He hadn’t been replying to my letters.”

  Solomon lifted a flat round tin from the Runner’s desk as if in explanation. “White oxide of arsenic, soluble in water. The moral circumstances indicate brandy tincture of the poison was ingested seven or eight hours before the onset of death.”

  Solomon turned to the spectacled man, who nodded before introducing himself as Mr Cline, surgeon at Guy’s Hospital. “Often called on to advise Bow Street on such matters.” He took a corked ampoule from his inside pocket, and passed it to Wyre. “Heat isn’t kind to corpses.”

  Wyre dabbed a few drops under his nose. Lavender oil. It was a relief, though the smell seemed somehow prosaically beside the point.

  The arsenic, Cline continued, was discovered among an assortment of miniature chemical jars. The surgeon raised the lid of Leighton’s desk to reveal a row of bottles. Wyre recognized the spidery script on the labels from Thomas’s escritoire in Crispin Street. Why weren’t the bottles in Bow Street’s evidence room?