The Slum Reaper_Murder and corruption in Victorian London

by David Field

  Esther laid out the tea things and announced proudly that there was some of Jack’s favourite iced bun to go with it.

  ‘Food fit for a hero?’ Jack quipped with his old grin, but Esther wasn’t buying into it.

  ‘For how long do you intend to play that particular card?’ She reached up to the cupboard for the cake. ‘I promised Alice that you’d do something for her.’

  ‘What’s the matter? Has she been caught running a bawdy house upstairs?’

  ‘It’s a bit more serious than that, I’m afraid.’ Esther cut the cake and began to pour the tea as she passed on Alice’s worries regarding her niece Emily.

  Jack frowned. ‘We don’t run a lost dog service at the Yard. If the girl’s run off with her boyfriend, there’s nothing we can do, given that she’s over the legal age for that sort of thing. And if we do find her and try and persuade her to at least contact Alice, we may be accused of interfering in something that’s none of our business. The Commissioner would not be amused, particularly if she complained to the newspapers, and then you could wave goodbye to my promotion. I can obviously check that she’s not dead or anything, but beyond that there’s precious little I can do, particularly if I’m stuck behind a desk.’

  ‘What about Uncle Percy?’

  ‘Forget it. He’s up to his armpits in a whole string of murders in Bethnal Green. But thank you for reminding me — he was planning on paying us a visit as soon as I was discharged from hospital. It seems that Mother’s made him personally responsible for ensuring that I make a quick and full recovery.’

  ‘Has she now?’ Esther mused thoughtfully. ‘That gives me an idea.’

  ‘You’re not normally so enthusiastic in your welcomes,’ Percy observed as Esther sliced the roast lamb and ensured that he got four thick slices.

  ‘No wonder,’ Esther retorted, ‘since you have this terrible habit of getting Jack involved in your cases at considerable risk to him. And you’ve been known to drag me in as well from time to time. Though Jack can hardly involve me in his latest investigation, since it’s all to do with a missing governess in Hampstead.’

  ‘I haven’t said I’ll take the matter on yet,’ Jack attempted to protest, before the look in Esther’s eyes suggested that silence might be the best policy on his part.

  ‘Hampstead?’ Percy queried. ‘That’s “S” Division and almost off the Met’s map.’

  ‘That’s the woman’s last known address,’ Esther told him. ‘She’s Alice Bridges’ niece — you know, Alice upstairs, who helps mind the children?’

  ‘I can well imagine why you’d want to keep in her good books,’ Percy agreed, ‘but are you back at work already?’ he asked Jack with a look of concern.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Esther intervened before Jack could say otherwise. ‘Not officially, of course — he’s doing this as a private job for our very obliging upstairs neighbour.’

  ‘The Yard doesn’t do “private jobs”,’ Percy replied. ‘And Jack’s supposed to be resting until he can make a complete recovery and return to his official duties.’

  ‘This won’t wait, I’m afraid,’ Esther replied determinedly. ‘Alice is beside herself with worry and can’t get any satisfactory answers from the people her niece used to work for.’

  Percy looked deeply concerned. ‘Jack, you must understand that I can’t let you do this. Your mother will have my guts if I let you tramp the outer northern suburbs on only one leg. God alone knows how long it would set back your recovery and I’m supposed to be looking after your welfare.’

  ‘This matter’s too urgent,’ Esther insisted, ‘and Jack’s promised Alice.’

  ‘If it’s that important,’ Percy suggested, ‘why don’t I do it? My current investigations in Bethnal Green have hit so many brick walls that I’m beginning to suspect the local force of deliberate obstruction. I could probably spend an afternoon or so enquiring about this young woman you mention, and then Jack can stay home and rest. What do you say, Jack?’

  ‘If you insist,’ Jack replied weakly, intrigued by the way that events were turning out, ‘but you’ll need more details from Alice.’

  ‘I thought you’d already got those?’ Percy said suspiciously.

  ‘Early days,’ Jack explained. ‘I’d only agreed in principle. Shall we invite Mrs Bridges down to give us more information?’

  An hour or so later, Alice Bridges made her farewells, tearfully thanking Percy for undertaking to make enquiries concerning her missing niece. Percy also made his excuses and left, and as Jack closed the front door behind him he smiled and kissed Esther on the nose.

  ‘You should be in the Detective Branch, you scheming hussy you! Now, since the children appear to be asleep, let’s test the limitations of my broken leg, shall we?’

  Chapter Three

  The following afternoon, cursing his over-eager nephew and his persuasive wife, Percy realised that he had probably been the victim of a confidence trick. But as a childless man himself, if you discounted the years he’d spent bringing up his dead brother’s son, Jack, Percy had a soft spot for young people and he knew how Alice must be worrying about her missing niece. Even in leafy suburbs like Hampstead, horrible things could happen to young ladies who lacked street experience.

  Number twenty-seven Heath Street certainly looked like the sort of establishment where one could remain ignorant of life in the real world that Percy had been policing for over thirty years. Four stories high, in the sort of dressed stone that had been very popular when Percy’s own father had been trotting through the Essex countryside in his buggy, dispensing medicine and health advice to the wealthy, the place probably had four main bedrooms of its own, in addition to a clutter of ‘servants’ rooms’ on its uppermost floor. There was a detached building off to the left and the sweeping semi-circular drive up which he was crunching confirmed the suspicion that whoever owned it probably employed his own coachman. The whole place reeked of upper middle class privilege, and although Percy was not given to those new ‘progressive’ political policies that the newspapers devoted so much space to, he couldn’t help contrasting what lay in front of his eyes with the stews, with their stinking back courts, their vermin ridden single rooms housing a family of eight and their sullen resentful occupants that constituted his normal places of constabulary enquiry.

  He pulled the bell rod that hung from the front door and somewhere inside it sounded as if the faithful were being summoned to Sunday prayer. When nothing happened the first time, he tried again and turned slightly to his left to monitor the lace curtain on the bay window. When it twitched slightly to betray the presence of a heavy breather on the other side, he extracted the wallet containing his police badge and placed it firmly against the glass with a weak, resigned smile. The sound of heavy door bolts being withdrawn heralded the opening of the door and there stood a ‘tweenie’ in her black dress with matching starched white apron and cap. Whoever occupied this mansion clearly preferred to employ a ‘between maid’ rather than a butler to deal with unwelcome police officers.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Enright, Scotland Yard,’ he announced, his badge held high in the air. ‘I’d like to speak to your employer, if I may.’

  ‘The Master’s out fer the day, but the Mistress is in the drawing room,’ the girl informed him as she stepped backwards in a non-verbal invitation to enter. He did so, making a big display of wiping his feet on the inside doormat before following meekly into the room on the left of the hall, from which his arrival had been surveilled. A tall, elegantly dressed lady rose from her chair by the window, put down her book and asked his business as she looked him up and down in the manner of one inspecting a school child. She was, Percy surmised, in her mid to late thirties and time had been good to her. Or at least, someone had, since she had lost neither her youthful beauty nor her slender figure.

  ‘I’ve been asked to enquire into the current whereabouts of a Miss Emily Broome, who I believe was, until recently at least, employed by you as a governess.’

&n
bsp; ‘And what makes you think she is no longer employed by us?’ the woman replied in a voice that was pure Mayfair.

  ‘You are Mrs Mallory, I assume?’

  She nodded gracefully as if accepting a bouquet from a loyal admirer.

  ‘Millicent Mallory, that’s correct. My husband Spencer is attending to his London practice at this hour, but I believe that I may speak for him when I express our disappointment at the circumstances in which Emily came to leave our service. That will be all thank you, Jane,’ she advised the maid, who bowed slightly and oozed backwards out of the presence.

  ‘Why were you disappointed, might I ask?’ Percy enquired, since it seemed to be expected of him.

  ‘Do you have children, Inspector?’

  ‘Sergeant. No, I don’t.’

  ‘Well, we have two, and to lose a governess with no prior notice is the height of inconvenience, apart from being ethically inexcusable. She was here the evening before and gone the following morning. No note, nothing — although she did at least have the decency to leave her room tidy.’

  ‘When was this, exactly?’

  ‘Sometime in the first week of April. It’s now almost June and we haven’t yet found a suitable replacement. It’s really becoming intolerable.’

  ‘Do you happen to know of any particular reason for her unannounced departure?’ Percy enquired.

  ‘None whatsoever that warrants any sensible consideration. She was generously remunerated, she had her own room, she was very good with the children and so far as I was led to believe, she got on tolerably well with the other staff.’

  ‘I heard a suggestion that she may have taken off with a young man.’

  ‘You’ve presumably taken the liberty of talking to our cook behind my back? She told the same story to Emily’s aunt when she came looking for her — the same lady who I assume has reported her as missing. But to be perfectly candid with you, officer, the girl was not greatly endowed with beauty, and although she had a certain dignity about her and adequate manners, I find it difficult to believe that she would have attracted any young man sufficiently for him to have accepted responsibility for her future welfare. Then again, as I have no doubt you have occasion to observe in your professional capacity, you simply can’t be certain of anything with young people these days.’

  ‘Quite so, madam,’ Percy agreed. ‘Did you yourself know of any young man that she might have been seeing?’

  ‘We would have firmly prohibited anything of that sort. Given my husband’s elevated professional position, we couldn’t possibly have tolerated any such loose behaviour.’

  ‘Your husband being...?’ Percy enquired politely.

  ‘Spencer Mallory, senior partner of Mallory and Grainger in The Strand. He lists members of the nobility among his clientele, so clearly we could not be seen to encourage anything that smacked of immorality.’

  ‘Quite. Just a few more questions, if I may?’

  ‘Why aren’t you writing any of this down?’

  ‘One of the perks of my profession is the development of acute powers of memory, madam. Now, if I may ask, did Miss Broome take everything she possessed when she went missing? I’m really enquiring whether or not her departure was deliberate and planned in advance, or if she simply slipped out for the evening and met with foul play.’

  ‘Our staff members are not encouraged to “slip out for the evening”, as you put it,’ Mrs Mallory advised him down her nose. ‘Not the ones who live in, anyway.’

  ‘Quite. And finally, if I may — had she recently been paid? Put another way, would she have been in possession of money with which to purchase transport?’

  ‘She was paid monthly and would therefore have recently been in possession of almost seven pounds, plus whatever she may have saved up, of course. There’s a railway station on Hampstead Road, as you presumably know, and from there one can travel all the way into the East End, from where I believe she originated. I suggest that you ask there if you wish any further information regarding her current whereabouts.’

  This was one of the politest invitations to leave Percy had received in recent months and he opted to take the hint. As the same maid opened the front door for him and handed him his bowler, she smiled and said, ‘I hope you find them.’

  It wasn’t until he was halfway back down Heath Street on his way to the railway station that it occurred to Percy to wonder what the girl had meant by them.

  Chapter Four

  Percy strode through the front entrance to Bethnal Green Police Station under the familiar glare of the desk sergeant.

  ‘You again,’ the sergeant observed unnecessarily. ‘Inspector Mitchell’s in a foul old mood this mornin’, so don’t say I didn’t warn yer.’

  ‘Has he rented out my office yet?’

  The sergeant shook his head.

  ‘No, but there’s two sergeants from our lot waitin’ ter gerrit back. Yer gonna be ’ere fer much longer?’

  ‘Depends how much co-operation I get from the local force, doesn’t it?’ Percy smiled back sarcastically. ‘Up to now it’s been a few degrees short of bugger-all.’

  ‘Then yer won’t mind makin’ yer own tea, will yer?’ the sergeant responded gruffly.

  ‘At least that way I’ll be certain that nobody from this station’s poisoned it,’ Percy muttered back as he reached the staircase and took the flights two steps at a time.

  It wasn’t just the usual turf war between a local station and their perceived overlords at Scotland Yard. Most inner city station personnel had long since accepted that when it came to organised crime, repeat or multiple serious offences, matters of a political nature, or crime outbreaks that were beyond their own already stretched resources, the Yard had a vital role to play in the overall policing of Metropolitan London. But just occasionally it got personal, as in this case, in which it was being implied — and certainly inferred — that Bethnal Green detectives were incapable of solving a handful of murders right under their noses.

  But it went far beyond that, as the mandarins of the Yard were well aware, due to their regular liaison with officials of the recently created London County Council, which had taken over the responsibilities and functions of the now defunct Metropolitan Board of Works. A Royal Commission had reported adversely on the state of working class housing in various parts of the nation and had been particularly critical of the position in London’s East End. This had led to an Act of Parliament that empowered the LCC, as it was usually known for convenience and brevity, to acquire land, knock down slum housing and replace it with suitable accommodation for the honest worker.

  A policy that rang with optimism through the halls of government, but had been reduced to a dull thud upon any attempt to convert it into action, particularly in Bethnal Green and the area within it known euphemistically as ‘The Old Nichol’. Its narrow network of twenty overcrowded alleyways housed a staggering six thousand people in little over seven hundred cramped, damp, decrepit, vermin-ridden, insanitary hovels which, when subjected to a simple calculation, revealed an average of slightly over eight persons per house, many of which consisted of only one room measuring eight feet square.

  One inevitable consequence of this sort of squalor, hitherto associated solely with some of Her Majesty’s more far-flung outposts of Empire, such as Calcutta or Bombay, was crime, and The Old Nichol hosted it in abundance. Like some of its close neighbours, counting Whitechapel and Spitalfields, it was a bottomless pit of prostitution in all its monstrous manifestations, including the exploitation of children whose ages had not yet reached double figures. It was also a vipers’ nest of thieving, assault, drunkenness and disregard for authority, and if its unfortunate residents survived all of that, they were also required to surmount the endless challenge of unemployment, dire poverty and endemic disease born of insanitary and overcrowded living conditions.

  One would therefore have expected the LCC to proceed with all speed in removing this blemish on the countenance of Victoria’s realm and one would e
qually have expected those who were scheduled to be rehoused to throw up their sweaty caps in loud exclamations of joy. But this was far from the reality, and so Percy Enright had been obliged to base himself temporarily in Bethnal Green Police Station as the somewhat unwelcome implant from the new Yard headquarters on Victoria Embankment.

  As soon as the word leaked out from well-placed officials inside the LCC’s headquarters in Spring Gardens that there was an initiative being debated that could result in a cluster of streets in the heart of The Old Nichol being acquired for public housing, properties began changing hands and existing tenants began to be evicted. The cause was obvious — unscrupulous speculative landlords were moving in, buying up entire rows of almost totally uninhabitable residences for a pittance, ejecting the sitting tenants, then holding the LCC to ransom when it came to naming their price for the resale of the land.

  None of this necessarily happened voluntarily and Percy had been called in to investigate and solve almost single-handed a spate of murders which, it was suspected, were connected with these grubby transactions. The victims were believed to have been either property owners who refused to sell, or tenants who declined to move on from the only home they knew, inadequate though it might be, to make way for new ‘model lodgings’ whose rents would be way beyond their capacity to pay, given the artificially inflated price that the LCC had been obliged to pay for the land.

  The first demolitions were well under way by the time that the first victim — a man called Jack Broome — had been found dead under a pile of masonry in Short Street, one of the first to go under the sledgehammers. It had been believed that he had been a tragic victim of a workplace accident, given that he was a builder by trade, but then it had been reluctantly conceded, when penetrating questions were asked by LCC officials, not only that Jack Broome had not been employed in any demolitions in Short Street, but that he had lived in neighbouring Shoreditch anyway.