By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  If she was drugged and tied up, sir. The shallow cuts would be to wake her up.

  Interesting, said William. So they didn’t want to kill her. Or not right away.

  Perhaps they wanted information, sir, Blackwell went on. You said she had her share of bad dealings.

  I said she was a part of the swell mob, William said. I don’t know what kind of enemies she had.

  Breck was already shifting his weight as if to leave.

  A moment, Doctor, William said. Are you familiar with Bertillon’s methods?

  Breck regarded William with displeasure. I know Monsieur Bertillon, yes. And his theories. We communicated together on a case last spring.

  If you would take the woman’s measurements—

  It is of course difficult without all of the pieces, Mr. Pinkerton. But I have already done so. As much as I can.

  I’d like a copy of that sent to the Chicago office, William said. I’ll have an operative go through our records. See if anything turns up with an alias attached.

  It is the property of Scotland Yard. Not me.

  Send your results to me, Dr. Breck, said Shore. I’ll see that they get to Chicago, William. Now, Doctor. The bombing.

  The doctor wrung his soft hands, unperturbed. If you bring me a body I will look at it. I can do nothing with a bucket of bits.

  You have what we have, Shore said.

  Breck wet his lips with the nub of a long pink tongue. He said, I can tell you that there was a bomb. Your unfortunate haberdasher was standing next to it. Or upon it. Or perhaps even carrying it. He would have been very close.

  Shore regarded him with evident impatience. Wonderful.

  Mr. Blackwell, Breck said. Would you be so good as to take me to the haberdasher’s belongings?

  One last thing, Doctor, William said. Charlotte Reckitt. Was she with child?

  Breck paused, his long peeling fingers on the latch of the door. If she had been pregnant, Mr. Pinkerton, I should have mentioned it. Now if you gentlemen will excuse me—

  The two men left and Shore stared at the door after it had shut for a long moment and then he said in a careful voice, What do you think of our good doctor?

  William shook his head tiredly.

  Shore stood and crossed to the sideboard and withdrew a small silver flask from the cabinet there and two glasses. Your father didn’t much care for him either, he said. Breck’s clever with a corpse though. He helped us in the Toms killing last year. A piece of wadding recovered from the body was found to match a broadside in the man’s possession. How do you like your whiskey?

  In a bottle.

  Here’s a glass. Shore sat back down with a groan. Our Mr. Blackwell’s reliable, hm?

  That’s one word for it.

  He was an amateur boxing champion last year.

  Blackwell? I don’t believe it.

  Aye. You’d never know he was a reader of sensation novels.

  Penny dreadfuls?

  That Wilkie Collins and the like. Desk is full of them. I never could stomach a detective who was a reader.

  William turned the glass in his hands, the smoky liquid darkening there.

  Shore raised an eyebrow. What is it?

  Charlotte Reckitt has an uncle in Millbank, William said, his smile fading. An ex-priest. I’ll want to talk to him, I guess. Can you arrange it?

  You want an interview with Martin Reckitt.

  Before I leave, yes, William said. Just to be certain there’s nothing I’ve overlooked. Maybe he knows something about Charlotte’s business, who she worked with. I have a file to close. And then he caught himself, and glanced up. You know the man?

  I know the man. Aye.

  Well?

  Well nothing. I can’t see what Martin Reckitt could offer on this that wouldn’t be a lie straight out. Bastard’s been locked away for years.

  William shifted his bulk in the chair, grinding an elbow into the armrest. His trousers were tight, pinching at his belly. You never mentioned him, he said, with a slow quizzical wrinkling of his forehead. Niece turns up in pieces all over the city and you never mention you knew her uncle?

  Shore gave him an exasperated look. The man is in your files too. There’s no conspiracy here. What could he possibly have to do with it? After a moment Shore picked up a small framed photograph and passed it across to William. It was a speckled picture of a little girl in a white dress standing next to a gravestone, her face serious and un-shy, some inscription on the base of the stone that William could not make out.

  Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul, Shore recited. But rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

  Cheerful, William said.

  That’s the grave of Fanny Adams. She was murdered twenty years ago up in Alton. Cut up into pieces in a field on a sunny day and the killer just walked away from it. She was ten years old.

  Jesus, William muttered. What is wrong with this country?

  It’s a reminder, Shore said, ignoring the question. Instruments of vengeance, William. That is what we are.

  William shifted the photograph from one knee to the other then set it on the desk in front of him. Blunt instruments, maybe, he said. Does he know about her death yet?

  Who?

  For god’s sake. Charlotte Reckitt’s uncle.

  Shore’s chair creaked and thumped as he tucked himself nearer his desk. You went out to New Street on Friday, he said. What did you find? When William said nothing he went on: Nothing. Because we’d already gone through it all. Because there was nothing there. What happened to Charlotte Reckitt is most likely some kind of revenge killing. Bad people betraying other bad people and suffering for it. Sometimes they do get what they deserve. You should go back to Chicago, William, go home. Shore’s florid face turned in the weak light of the window, pausing as if to say something more. He grimaced. Then he said it. Staying here won’t get you any closer to your Edward Shade.

  William looked at him sharply. Edward Shade?

  You thought I didn’t know? You’ve been into every flash house in London asking questions. You don’t make it much of a secret.

  You’ve been following me.

  Please. Nothing so dramatic.

  William was leaning forward in his chair, turning the glass in his hands. He said, quietly, Edward Shade’s a ghost, John. He’s not real.

  Oh, Shade was real. He was real as a bullet. He died during your Civil War.

  What are you talking about?

  Your father never told you?

  William could feel the blood rise in his cheeks. Told me what?

  Shore’s thick red fingers were still. Well, he said. I only know what your father told me. Shade was an agent for him in the war. A spy. He volunteered to go south to gather information and something happened, I don’t know what, but he was caught. The Confederates tortured him. That was the last your father heard about him. I expect Shade died in a prison or was shot as a spy or suchlike. I understand some sort of evidence turned up, something rather compelling. Two graves, one marked with the name of a fellow spy. But then a year or so after the war was finished your father took to the notion that maybe Shade had survived. I don’t know what changed his mind. I think he wanted Shade to still be alive, wanted to believe he just walked away from the war and disappeared. I guess he never forgave himself for failing the lad. He never told you about this?

  William was shaking his head. There’s a grave?

  Aye. In Virginia.

  Why would my father suddenly think he didn’t die? It doesn’t make sense.

  I told him that myself.

  William looked at Shore. There were documents, he said, in a file. In my father’s home safe. Records of jobs Shade was involved in. All dated after the war.

  Rumours of jobs you mean. And never any evidence of the man. Am I right?

  He frowned.

  Go ask old Benjamin Porter, if you doubt it, Shore said with a shrug. He and Sally were there when Shade cr
ossed the lines. They were the ones he rode out with. They were the last ones to see him alive.

  Sally Porter?

  Aye. And Benjamin.

  I was with Ben in Virginia, he said slowly. In sixty-two.

  Shore regarded him strangely. Your father had those old Porters hunting Shade over here for years. I guess since they knew him by sight. I expect they’re both still in the city somewhere.

  William rubbed at his face with both hands. He was thinking of Sally Porter in her ruined hovel, how she had said nothing to him of this.

  William? You all right?

  After a moment he stood and buttoned his chesterfield and stared down at the chief inspector with a quiet grimness. Arrange an interview for me with Reckitt’s uncle, John, he said. Let me finish this and get back to Chicago. I’m not here to get dragged into anything.

  Shore’s small eyes fixed on William’s.

  I’d say you’re already in it, he said.

  He came down out of Whitehall with his face grey and his bruised hand trembling. He had known his father as a violence and a scarring that burned coldly in his flesh. The old man’s death had taken the shared part of them with it and left William alone in his regret. He could not explain to his wife that he did not now know what to do with his memory of the man. It had never been intimacy. His father had run a network of spies throughout the war and shared little of it with his sons. His father had discussed the particulars of Edward Shade with strangers at the Yard and never seen fit to confide in his own blood. William thought of Sally Porter in anger and then he did not. All he knew of his father’s violent past, of his habits, his medical cocktails, of the stories behind each keepsake in the man’s rolltop desk, the grapeshot that had been pulled from his father’s saddle, the laces that had nearly garrotted him in Detroit, the dried daffodils and morningdew pressed in the pages of a Bible carried overseas from Edinburgh a lifetime gone. All of this and none had been the man in his breathing.

  The death of his father meant William too had crossed a threshold. That was the fact of it. It had surprised him. Love was not the word for what he’d felt for his father. He knew some part of his own self lay diminished and mouldering in the wet earth back in Chicago. He pressed his hand against the cold cast iron of a street lamp outside Scotland Yard, he stared out at the fog.

  NINE

  William Pinkerton. What was the famed detective’s first son but a wisp, a rumour, a creature of nightmare walking the flash world, frightening all. Few had met him who did not count the days in chalk on prison walls, who did not nurse a broken bone. Foole was never among them. He had heard tell of terrible strength, true, of a man who did not sleep for days, who could survive without food or water in the stunted wastes of the western territories driving horse after horse bridle-first down to dust, who would drift along the water-rotted docks of New York with impunity. The man was thirty, no forty, no fifty, no the man did not age. It was said he could read a lie on a face like wind cutting across a lake. He could crush a pint glass with one squeeze and his weathered hands not bleed. In Chicago he frequented Madison’s flash house those Fridays when he was in town and he would go down among the dippers and sharps there with a wary smile and stand unmolested at the bar and drink a cider very slowly, watching the flash world all the while watch him back. Some swore he could stare down a bull. Others swore his eyelids had been burned off as a boy and he did not blink as a consequence. In Virginia he was seen to leap from a moving train carriage onto a horse held up alongside and to then unsling a rifle and shoot a man down all before the other could draw. In the Black Hills he had beaten a sheriff into submission with his bare fists and broken every finger of both hands in the process and picked up his gun with the soft of his wrists when it was done. Foole had heard it said the only world he hated more than the criminal one was the world of the law and this was said with a knowing grin always. There were men who said his children were not his own. Others denied this and swore on their poke his brother’s children were his also. All agreed the man was not like other men and lacked the common human appetites and whatever else he was a man without weakness, a man without pity. As the years passed Foole would listen while the myths grew and he would wonder and rub his eyes and try to imagine the true son of Allan Pinkerton in the flesh.

  And this was the man who had hunted Charlotte to her end.

  Fludd thought it the worst of luck. He came back from his inquiries sighing and shaking his shaggy head. Bloody hell, Mr. Adam, he muttered, seated at the plank table in the kitchen. I just got meself out of a stone jug, I ain’t got no inclination of visitin its like again. Not for a while now. Don’t make me get no closer.

  Tell me about him, Foole said softly. Tell me what you’ve heard.

  A long miserable look, ringed eyes peering under bedraggled brows. Mr. Adam—

  Tell me, Foole said again.

  As the mornings passed into afternoons, the afternoons into evenings, he would lean suddenly to one side with a hand splayed on the wall and eyes closed and see again that painting from the gallery. Or he would stare out at the drifting brown fog through the Emporium windows and recall in confusion the paint, the brushwork, the light in those eyes, and think again of Charlotte with a savagery that left him shaken. He woke and he slept and he ate with a woodenness that left Molly and Fludd anxious and made Mrs. Sykes crack a tea towel sharply out over her shoulder and purse her lips and leave whatever room he entered. He did not like the idea that William Pinkerton had been alone with Charlotte when she died but Fludd’s inquiries into the manner of her death came to nothing beyond a dark rumour of mutilation. It’s Gabriel you want to be askin, the giant told him reluctantly on the second evening. No, he replied, I’ll not, but knowing even as he protested that his old friend was right. When he left Half Moon Street at a troubled pace he could feel the big man’s eyes boring into his back from an upper window and once he reached the cold of Piccadilly he hailed a hansom and rode distracted and alone the rest of the way to the Inns of Court.

  Gabriel Utterson was a creature who had winched his survival to knowing both what others wanted to know and what they feared becoming known. Foole had considered him an accomplice once and then a friend during his long years of informing and then neither and then both again. He thought of the dozens of letters the man had written him about Charlotte and her affairs and he shook his head in disgust. As he crossed a frozen surf of mud in the street he tucked his chin in his collar seeking neither resemblance nor recognition in the faces of the law clerks he passed. At the end of a courtyard he found a thick oak door and he tried the latch and went up and at the third-floor landing he found Utterson’s name set in a brass plate above a buzzer. He held his finger there a moment but did not press it and instead opened the door and went in.

  It was the same high-ceilinged office, if shabbier than he remembered. Lit only by a single gas sconce behind a copying desk, tall doors opening out on the far side of the clerk’s chair. But the man bent over a file there was no clerk and Foole regarded him in confusion a moment before clearing his throat.

  What happened to your assistant? he said.

  Utterson looked up in alarm. He had hard little eyes like the heads of nails, creased in the folds of his face, as if driven in. But there were purple rings now in the skin under them. He was softer than he had been a year ago, his flesh sagging in loops and flattened bags, like a water sack slackening and draining slowly. Foole took in the long austere hands, nails chewed to stumps, the cleft chin. A sprouting of wiry hairs from the cavities of his ears.

  Mr. Adam Foole, Utterson said, setting down his pencil.

  Hello Gabriel.

  Neither man smiled. The lawyer cast a disagreeable look at the door and said, I can see no purpose in a bell if a man is not inclined to ring it. Then he sat back, sighed. I’ve had to let three clerks go in six months, he said. Imagine it. Well.

  He led Foole through to an adjoining office and shut the door behind them and pulled the curtains closed an
d then waved to a sofa against one wall. Foole walked over to it with his hat upturned in one hand and his gloves stuffed in the crown but he did not sit. In his other hand he gripped his walking stick in a grip too knuckled and fierce for a friendly visit. Utterson had rolled out a crank stool from behind his desk. Let me have a look at you, he said. How is business, no better? Did you return with your Mr. Fludd intact? Has his stay in America ruined him utterly?

  Charlotte is dead, Foole said.

  Utterson’s colourless eyes diminished to slits.

  Did you know it?

  The lawyer wet his lips. I have heard talk, he said. Yes. He was silent a moment and then he rose and poured two glasses of brandy from a sideboard and Foole shifted his hat to the other hand and took his cautiously but he did not drink. How much do you know? Utterson asked.

  Only that it’s being investigated.

  Investigated, Utterson said with a frown. A dirty yellow glow was filling the curtains from the courtyard below and Foole at last sat, watching it the while, waiting, and then Utterson said, Part of her was recovered out on Edgware Road, sir. Part of her was, he coughed sharply, pulled from the Thames.

  Foole squeezed his eyes shut.

  Her head, sir. A labourer on the docks recovered it, five days ago. Utterson leaned over his desk, the crank stool creaking in protest. I understand there are still pieces of her missing.

  Pieces.

  Her legs.

  Foole was quiet, taking this in. I thought she drowned, he said at last. I was told she drowned. How is this possible?

  It is London, sir. Anything is possible.

  But if she jumped from Blackfriars—

  Jumped, Utterson said sharply. He raised a hand to his chest, the slack of his throat spilling out over his collar. That seems hardly likely, does it not, given the condition of her body. Utterson lowered his voice. I do not like to say it, sir. But I have heard a rumour—

  Who did she cross, Gabriel?

  I cannot be certain, of course—

  Who?

  Pinkerton’s son. William.

  Foole blinked, frowned. He took a long slow sip of the brandy and stared at the floor and then he shook his head. William Pinkerton didn’t carve Charlotte into pieces, he said.