THE DEAD CONSTABLES.
SERGEANT BENTLEY MURDERED ON ANNIVERSARY OF HIS WEDDING.
The shots of the Houndsditch desperadoes have killed three men of the finest type of the London police officer. They could not have laid low three men more popular with their companions or more respected by the general public.
The three officers were alike in their courage, their efficiency, their strength; they were also alike in their good humour, their kindliness, and the strong personal affection in which they were held.
Sergent Robert Bentley, who died late on Saturday night from the effect of five bullet wounds to the neck and chest, would have been thirty-seven years of age on Boxing Day.
He was married nine years ago on the 16th of December, so he was murdered on the anniversary of his wedding day.
His wife, although in delicate health, was able to be with him when he died. He leaves behind a little girl seven years of age.
Sergeant Charles Tucker, who was shot in the neck and died in a few minutes, was an older man. He had seen twenty-five years’ service in the police force, and was already entitled to retire on a pension, but was retained owing to the heavy demands which will be made on the police during the Coronation.
Constable Choate, who died in the London Hospital on Saturday morning, had been in the City police force for fifteen years.
Only ten days ago he went down to Horsham for the burial of his mother. […]
He was one of the best billiard players in the City Police and spent much of his spare time practising the game on the table in the Bishopsgate station.
THE KING’S MESSAGE.
SYMPATH WITH THE RELATIVES OF THE DEAD OFFICERS.
The King has sent a message to the Commissioners of the City Police saying that he has heard with great concern of the murder of the three constables belonging to the City Police.
His Majesty has requested the Commissioners to express to the widows and families his sincere sympathy and the assurance that he feels most deeply for them in their sorrow.
He has also directed the Commissioners to express to the wounded constables his sympathy with them in the severe wounds they have received in the execution of their duty, and his hope that they will make a good progress towards a complete recovery.
His Majesty also asks to be informed of their present condition.
A Storm in the Blood
PART III
THE SIEGE
Thirty
TO PUSH AGAINST OPPOSITION, even when oblivion itself is the enemy, to show courage and humanity, care for the reputation you enjoy among your neighbors—all beautiful ideals, let us agree, that are universally distributed around the world’s population. It’s reasonable to expect to find such qualities in abundance among doctors, human beings who swear an oath, in three small words, to the race’s highest virtues: Do No Harm. This pledge had a special meaning for Dr. John James Scanlon in the wake of that night’s murders in Houndsditch.
During the desolate morning hours when Karl lay dying, pain blunted a little by the medicine Dr. Scanlon made up for him, the medical man tussled with his own soul. On one hand, his obligation to the Law bent him to notify the police of any wounding or death by gunshot; on the other hand, bending to that law meant courting the risk, when word got out, of denunciation by his neighbors in Whitechapel. He’d be shunned, blacklisted, branded an informer. If things should come to that, what good could he do?
Against his will, Dr. Scanlon found himself in motion, a cog in the strange clockwork of events ratcheting ahead on that mid-December weekend. Slow in contacting the police, quicker in alerting the newspapers, on Saturday morning he fired the starting gun on a race to Grove Street between an armed squad of detectives and a pack of reporters loping after the same rumored survivors.
A contest bagged by DI Wensley’s detectives, pistols drawn, no more than minutes to spare. Shadow and quiet held the stairway. Wensley kept his voice low. “Take care going up. No banister.” The file of men climbed to the first-floor landing, where the door to the front bedroom was closed. Sergeant Leeson stepped forward and gave the doorknob a quarter of a turn. Unlocked. A nod from DI Wensley ordered him into the room, and the sergeant’s nod back brought in the others to meet a threat no greater than a woman half-asleep in front of the fire, destroying evidence. She didn’t move an inch when the men tramped into the room behind her.
Sergeant Leeson clamped his fingers around Rosie’s wrist to stop her adding the photograph of a young woman to the ash-choked fire. “Who’s that you want to get rid of, then?”
No protest from Rosie when he tugged it away from her and dropped it back onto the stack of unincinerated papers. Mechanically, exhausted, mesmerized, under his eyes, she slid Luba’s photo off the pile again and toward the grate. The toe of the sergeant’s boot gently blocked it. Then she felt him reach under her arms and lift her off the floor. Rosie stayed quiet until she faced Karl’s corpse. Past the four or five policemen elbowing around each other for a gander at the dead terrorist, she saw where his blood blackened the sheet—saw his white shirt, Karl’s rigid arm. And her cry, coiled inside Rosie for half the night, spiraled out of her lungs; her throat shook with it, a gull’s shriek of earsplitting agony, the last sound to reach the world from a drowning soul, unbearable.
“Remove that woman,” Wensley said, and Sergeant Leeson bundled Rosie outside to the landing. “What do you think this is?” he asked the detective standing next to him, handling the painted wooden sword by the foil belt attached to it.
“Looks like some kind of sword, sir.”
“And their bullets are gumdrops.” Wensley looked across to an object in the hands of DI Thompson. “Got something there?”
Thompson tilted the unframed watercolor into the light. “Pretty scene.”
“Is it?” Wensley doubted, then examined it himself, front and back. He glanced at the signature: Yourka 16/12/10. “Here’s something prettier.” With his thumb, he underlined the writing on a slip of paper stuck to the back of the painting: G. Dubof beside the address 20 Galloway Rd, Shepherd’s Bush.
The mixture of loose cartridges in the upturned tweed cap on the table next to the dead man interested the detective-inspector. Six Mauser pistol cartridges, older Mauser rifle cartridges, other bullets he counted in the jumble fit Morris tube and small rook rifles. Next thing fished up, the Dreyse pistol, from its hiding place underneath Karl’s pillow, plus two fully loaded clips. The Crown’s barristers wouldn’t lack for exhibits in court.
A clamor on the street from the wolf pack down there mooch ing ’round the door made Wensley think, This work is difficult enough without outsiders mobbing us. Their barked questions and complaints ruffled the air, not his concentration. Through the closer conversation in the dead man’s room, he heard booted footsteps hurrying upstairs; he heard his name spoken. “Here, Constable.”
The young policeman said, “It’s a man, sir. Down at the door.”
“What about him?”
“He’s asking to see Fritz.”
“Is he still there?” Wensley pressed him, made way for the PC to take a look from the window. “Do you see him?”
“Yes. Little mustache. He’s waiting very polite, sir.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Asked him to wait there till I spoke with you.”
“Did he give his name?”
The constable read from his notebook. “Not sure I got it spelt right, but the name he give me is Tom-a-coff. Nicholas, his Christian name, sir.”
“I SAY YOU: no. I do not go there help Fritz crime. Not other boys too.” Nicholas stumbled through an account of his visit to Grove Street, voluntarily offered, a proclamation of his good character. When he was stuck for the correct word, he turned to the Russian interpreter, grudgingly, avoiding a direct look.
DI Wensley needed something more than veiny emotional assertion to convince him of this young man’s value to the investigation, let alone Nicholas Tomacoff’s moral goodn
ess. At the table under the electric light, sitting as close to Nicholas as he would if they’d been enjoying a pint together in a pub, the detective-inspector frowned, rubbed his brow, and with a short silence allowed everyone present to appreciate his seriousness of purpose. Then: “You mentioned to the constable you’re one of Fritz’s friends. In what circumstances did you meet Mr. Svaars?”
“Please?”
“Am I speaking too fast? I’m sorry, Mr. Tomacoff. Again. You’re a friend of Fritz Svaars?” He gestured toward the interpreter, who repeated the last question in Nicholas’s own language.
“I teach Fritz play mandolin.”
“You regard each other in a friendly way. You’re friends. Nothing wrong about that,” Wensley said. “It’s perfectly natural for someone to help out a friend, perfectly understandable.”
“Not for make crime he hurt England. Good place in England,” Nicholas said, with feeling. “Good men here.”
“Would you say more of your friends are English or foreigners?”
“No. Please again?”
“Plain and simple, Mr. Tomacoff, the majority of your friends, are they English or are they Russians? Or Letts, Jews, or what?”
“All kinds, all. Yes. English boys jolly good, same.”
The Russian, who stood at DI Wensley’s elbow, offered to put the question; Wensley moved on with a curt wave. “Who else do you know at Grove Street? The man who was shot dead, the gentleman we know as George Gardstein?”
For this answer, Nicholas sought from the Russian an unambiguous translation. He had met Karl for the first time at the party in Grove Street less than a week before. He could not, would not, say he was a friend of his.
“Who else was at this party? Besides Svaars and Gardstein.”
“Luba. Nina…”
Discreet as a butler, the constable cribbed from his notebook and refreshed Wensley’s memory. “Luba Milstein, Svaar’s mistress. Nina Vasilyeva, she’s Gardstein’s.”
“And the man we know as Peter the Painter?”
“Him, yes. His woman also.”
“The Painter’s got a mistress, too, like ’em all,” Wensley noted to himself. “And what’s she called?”
“She is call Rivka.”
“Know her second name?”
Nicholas shook his head, apologetically, more aware than he’d seemed until then that this record-straightening chat was taking place within the confines of an interrogation room inside Leman Street police station, and he needed to ask for permission if he suddenly wanted to leave. DI Wensley pushed a blank piece of paper and a sharpened pencil across the table. “Nicholas, I’d like you to write down the names of everybody who came to that party. Do that for me now, yes?” In precise English lettering, solid as notes on a stave, he’d written three names and started on a fourth when Wensley asked him, “This celebration, the night before they went to Houndsditch, was it?”
“Two, three day.”
“What went on?”
“What was party? Play song, much,” Nicholas said softly, hearing them again. “Music from balalaika, violin. Sing. Talk.”
“What did you talk about? With who?”
“I? I teach Fritz play mandolin song. Other boys talk. What I hear them, not so much. They talk on jail. Home.”
Nicholas volunteered this information with the thought, In any jail in Russia a police interrogator wouldn’t be so polite; by now he’d be listening to me yelp and beg for the beating to stop. A stone-hearted tormentor? Not this fellow! Even Fritz would see this Englishman wasn’t born with the stomach for torture. Besides that, what kind of man was he? Nicholas plucked clues from the two hours he’d been sitting at that small table across from DI Wensley: the man’s patience, the firm hint of its limits, mature assurance in the stillness of his voice and face, traits Nicholas took to be as English as the rain. His walrus mustache, fatherly; his broad chin, of the people; his wag of the head, his homely jowls, sincere. No Jew-hater peeped out at Nicholas from his questioner’s pinprick eyes—the bigot that Peter said lived inside every Englander—no contempt in them for a foreigner “lower than the dirt,” no, the opposite. DI Wensley’s eyes compressed under the consideration he gave to every word Nicholas uttered. Here was a man whose respect, when he ceased to withhold it, was awarded to you with the force of vindication.
His estimation was not wildly off the mark, although the sincerity and fatherly assurance the young Russian poeticized out of Frederick Wensley’s mustache, chin, and jowls were, in truth, on show to pass along a practical message: Make no mistake, puppy, I’m a stayer. He was the Somerset outsider who’d waded through his years of insult and near invisibility in the Met, diligent and keen and thus mistrusted, passed over, and he stayed. Probationer to constable to detective to DI at forty-five, a sluggish climb, but without a misstep.
The foreigners he’d known in the district for more than twenty years, all with the same fault in their language—total incomprehension of the letter W—called him Vensel. Which migrated into an H Division joke and almost affectionate nickname: Weasel. Never mind, it’d been no harm, not to me. The Weasel’d on ’em, so harm to them. Street robbers. Pickpockets. Burglars. Murderers. Anarchists. Enemies of good people. We’ve got enough to battle against in our lives without this deliberate muck. Look at me and listen (Wensley said to Nicholas with every word he didn’t say)—you’re trying to figure me and reckon your chances? Here, I’ll tell you, pup. I’m the bastard who’s going to arrest your friends.
“You haven’t been in England for very long, I understand.”
“June I am here. Seven month.” A long time, by Nicholas’s calendar. “Stay London is good with me.”
“Mr. Tomacoff, are you an anarchist?”
Nicholas slapped the table. “I say you no! Not of Liesma!”
“All your friends, the men you’ve named…” Wensley pointed at the page between them on the table. “They’re members of Liesma. Anarchists. Criminals who murder English policemen.”
“I teach Fritz play mandolin. He ask me go his house for make party.” For a few seconds, Nicholas met Wensley’s strategic silence with intensity of his own. As if the taut string that held his spine had been cut, his shoulders dropped. “I take you where they hide,” he said.
“Who? Fritz, you mean? Peter?”
“Also Yoska.”
DI Wensley turned around to ask the constable, “Which one’s Yoska?” While the PC thumbed through his notes, Wensley pushed Nicholas, “When did you see them?”
“Three o’clock. Fritz Svaars, Yoska Sokoloff, Peter Piatkow.”
“Write down the address.” On the page of names, Nicholas added the address, and Wensley read it aloud for the constable to copy into his notebook. “Havering Street. Number Thirty-six.” Then, to Nicholas, “How do I know you’re not leading us into an ambush?”
An appeal to the interpreter, and after Nicholas took in the meaning of the question, he slumped back in his chair, bruised and bewildered. “Take guns. Fritz and other boys take guns.”
“You’d better pray they don’t use them.” What Wensley said next had the sound of an afterthought, a question from the private man, not the detective. “Do you pray?”
“Pray?”
“To God. You believe in God? Reigns over us like the king in England, the tsar in Russia?”
“Sir, I believe same God like you.”
They left Nicholas in the room, in the unofficial custody of the Russian interpreter. Let him catch his breath, reminiscing with his countryman about samovars and balalaikas, moonlight on the Volga. In the corridor outside, DI Thompson more than hinted at his doubt that Nicholas Tomacoff’s word could be trusted. “You don’t think they give up their comrades, do you, Wensley?”
“We’ll find out when we call upon Havering Street.”
The constable felt relaxed enough to remark, “Seen it in Whitechapel, right, sir? Give a Jew an inch and he’ll put a bed in it. Give him two, he’ll take in lodgers.”
&nb
sp; It was slander, and Wensley did the constable a favor by letting it pass without rebuke. Business of the day was with his partner in this manhunt, the City detective-inspector. Wensley thought back, and said to DI Thompson, “I do believe him. Question the authority of God, you question every other kind of authority. He really does want to stay in England. Got that from him free and clear.”
“Yes, well?”
“You can’t be any kind of a citizen and question authority, can you?” He wagged his hand confidentially between his chest and Thompson’s. Finally, another reflection. “I should have said that in there. Might’ve pinched the address out of him quicker.”
PETER BLAMED HIS sharply plummeting spirits on the rotten joke Yoska made as they walked past the doctor’s surgery two doors along from their hideout. It spooked Peter’s mind with the regret that he was not on his way to Poplar, alone and unburdened by one man ready to fling himself like a grenade against anybody in a uniform and another one skipping—or limping—here to there like an infant playing hide-and-seek with his wee friends in Special Branch. “That’s the alley you’re talking about?” He led Yoska the few steps back to the turning, to the iron gate at the mouth of what looked to Peter like an unbroken passageway stretching the length of the row of brick houses.
“It cuts through the yards. This street”—Yoska jabbed his thumb over his shoulder—“to that one.” He pointed vaguely ahead of them, to the opposite side of the square enclosed by two-and three-story buildings. Maybe a hundred windows looked down on doors to the yards and alley, Peter guessed. A route back to the mundane chaos of Commercial Road. “Let’s get inside,” Yoska said.
Sleet glossed the cobbles and pavement of a thoroughfare as ordinary as any in Stepney. At the far end, a dray cart loaded with beer barrels rattled out of a brewery yard, and at this early hour, it was the only movement besides the three fugitives huddled at a front door, a fifteen-second dash from either corner. Peter trusted Yoska to bring them to a safe place, and when he vouched for the tameness of “my Betsy,” Peter trusted him on that score, too. Though not irrevocably.
A Storm in the Blood Page 24