By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  Aye, Shore grunted. Someone went to a regular lot of trouble to dump this.

  What, in some weeds? In a ditch?

  On the other bloody side of the city, Shore growled. Could have saved himself the trouble and sunk the legs like he did the head.

  I take it no one saw anything.

  Never do. Not in Bermondsey.

  You’ve talked to the residents?

  Aye.

  William stood with his eyes fixed on the sacking and he thought about it. How long has it been here?

  Shore shook his head. Since morning, Dr. Breck tells me. The blood’s dried on the bag so the legs were stuffed in shortly after they were cut from the body. But the sack’s just cold and only a little damp on the underside so it wasn’t here in the night when it rained.

  And no one saw anything.

  As I said. Poor woman.

  A squelching of shoes through the soft muck. A sniff. Breck loomed out of the mist, rubbing his fingers clean in a twist of handkerchief as if he had just been sifting something foul. There are no footprints near the remains, he said curtly.

  There are now, William muttered.

  There are, however—and Breck half turned and gestured across a murky ditch thick with grey watercress—several indistinct marks leading back towards the park over there. Most likely from a pair of shoes wrapped in cloth to hide their prints.

  What does that tell us? Shore asked.

  That the dumping was done by a lone individual, William said quietly.

  And that he or she had the foresight to conceal their footprints, Breck continued. Or that their shoes need to be protected from the mud.

  She? William said.

  Need to be protected? Shore said. Because they’re of high quality, you mean?

  Breck shrugged.

  She? William said again.

  Breck was leaning over his trunk and opening the lid and he did not look up as he spoke. Perhaps. It is possible the body was cut up because it was too heavy to dispose of all in a piece. And it is possible the footprints would have given us some important detail about our suspect. Such as a lady’s footprints.

  Possible, William said. But likely?

  Possible, Breck said. He withdrew from his trunk a strange contraption. It appeared to be a bull’s-eye lantern but had been outfitted with a complicated series of lenses and refractors and set upon a short handle and when Breck opened its shutter a powerful arc of light zeroed in on the sack. He had taken off his silk hat and he folded his coat over the open lid of the trunk and unhooked his spectacles and then he put on a leather mask with straps that crossed at the nape and buckled together so that a sequence of optical magnifiers on delicate rods could be swung out in front of the eyes. When he glanced up his eyes goggled gruesomely out. He gave a strange sort of leer.

  Gentlemen, he said.

  Oh for god’s sake. Shore put a hand on his hat. You’ll make us a sideshow, Dr. Breck.

  You are already a sideshow, sir.

  William watched him work with interest. The thin man kneeling in the muck. Guiding that dazzling beam of light with one hand inch by inch over the sacking, lifting its edges with a small steel instrument in the shape of a fork with the other. He pried open the mouth of the sack, sniffed at its underlining without disturbing the remains within. After a moment he cocked his head and said, Mr. Pinkerton. Do you know what a collodion slide is?

  William frowned. He had no idea.

  In the leather box in the trunk, Breck said. You will find a series of glass plates. Bring one to me.

  It was a glass plate sticky with some adhesive substance and the doctor took it from him without a word and bent back to his work.

  What have you found? Shore asked.

  I cannot be certain.

  Breck handed William the collodion slide and he held it carefully up and could make out two tiny white insects pressed between the glass.

  This sack was not open like this earlier, sir. Has someone interfered with it? I instructed you to let no one near. Must I continually remind your constables what contamination means?

  Shore said nothing. William said nothing.

  After a moment Breck made a low throaty grunt and leaned in deeper. The hairs on the legs are dark, he said. But you will see, Mr. Shore, here at the very tips of the follicles they appear grey, do they not? Most interesting. Mr. Pinkerton, another slide.

  William obliged. The doctor took a second scraping, a third.

  After a moment Shore caught William’s eye and they stepped back, away from the evidence. I wonder what hour the evening editions make the streets, he said.

  William clapped his hands together for the cold. What are you thinking?

  This was dropped here this morning. If news of the head was already out it’s entirely likely the drop was deliberate.

  What do you mean?

  I mean maybe it wasn’t about hiding anything.

  William was silent.

  We were supposed to find this bag today.

  And it’ll be in the papers tomorrow.

  Shore nodded. But why in god’s name would anyone do this? What’s the point? To terrify people? To taunt us?

  Maybe to send a message.

  A message.

  William shrugged. After a moment he said, You’ll bury her now I guess.

  That might be how you do things in Chicago.

  Bury our dead?

  Bury the evidence.

  I guess so. I guess we’re just crazy enough to do that.

  She doesn’t seem to have any relatives. Other than her uncle. No, we’ll keep her out of the ground a while yet.

  Until you’ve got a handle on this?

  Or until someone comes forward with a claim to her. Shore ran the water from his forehead with a thumb. It was a wet fog and William could feel the damp seeping through his own coat. I keep meaning to ask, Shore said. The missus has been hoping to have you out at the house for an evening. Our cook makes a rather fine blood pudding.

  Blood pudding.

  Aye.

  If I’m here long enough, he said, I just might brave it. In the fog the cold street looked ghostly. I’ve got a wife and daughters to get back to, John. And the Agency needs me.

  That would be your defective agency?

  William smiled.

  Sounds like you have two wives, Shore said.

  Margaret says it herself.

  When Dr. Breck is finished I want you to get this cleared out, lads, Shore said suddenly to two constables at work searching the weeds. Be careful with it. Anything might be of use to us. He turned back to William. About Martin Reckitt, he said. Take Blackwell with you on Wednesday and see what you can get out of him. I’ve got you your hour.

  William watched the men at their labours in the mist.

  All right, he said.

  He made his way back, at last, to Sally Porter’s tenement behind Snow Fields.

  He had been dreading doing so but wanted to hear her account for herself directly. If Shore’s account of the Porters smuggling Shade through Virginia was true, then Sally had lied to him. Had sat shivering across from him in her darkness and lied. He could not think why she would keep such a detail from him except that his father too had done so. He thought again of that toast to the Union dead his father had raised in the year of the war’s ending, that sad litany of names, of the boy Edward who completed the list. His father had once, it seemed, believed Edward Shade to have died. Whatever had caused him to doubt it remained a mystery. What was clear to William was that his father had believed it. And his father, whatever else, was never a fool.

  The shop windows he passed were dusty in the chill and he could see the vague silhouettes of flypaper and thin strips of grey meat on hooks through the glass. Sally’s lie to him, that Shade was never real, might, he thought suddenly, be connected to her knowing some truth about the matter. She might be able to tell him what it was that had so convinced his father of Edward Shade’s survival. What secret was she keeping? He walked
on over the clattering slat-board walks speaking to no one and ignoring the cries of the beggars from their ditch-side perches. He felt wearied by the discovery of the legs, saddened by the whole shabby business of it. He had thought to make his way to the pubs surrounding the London docks after but as the afternoon waned into evening he understood it would have to wait. After a time he took his bearings and turned left and slipped down a wretched alley and through a broken iron gate into the worm-rotted stairwell of Sally Porter’s building. A dog was nosing some wadded rag in the shadow and when he came in it lifted its snout and growled. He stopped and regarded it. Then he turned away. The stairs shuddered under his heavy steps but at the third-floor landing he paused. Her door stood open.

  He could see it from where he had stopped. He waited in that cold hallway and adjusted his hat and peered behind him, listening. There were raised voices coming from her room and he frowned and felt in the pocket of his topcoat for his Colt and then he made his slow approach.

  It was a family.

  Destitute and filthy and squabbling in the chaos.

  He stood in the doorway a moment, confused. The old Porter desk had been upturned and pushed against one wall and the cracked elephant stood yet on the mantel above the old fireplace though someone had hung a rag from its trunk to dry.

  The woman, girl, mother of that brood had let out a screech and was swatting at one child and then picking up a knife from the table when she saw him and then all fell silent.

  Hello, he said, something sinking inside him.

  She came at him with a directness and speed that alarmed him. He stepped back though he was thrice her size and well acquainted with knives. She stood in the doorway pushing at the head of a child in her skirts its face all filth and rage.

  We ain’t payin it twice, she snapped. We ain’t payin you neither.

  He held up his hands. Where’s Sally? he said.

  Her eyes narrowed. Ain’t you for the rent?

  I’m not for the rent.

  A green blanket had been strung up on a rope cutting the bed from William’s sight and a long low racked cough started from behind it and an elbow bloomed against the blanket and then a man’s hoarse voice cried out.

  Who is it, Maggs, he called. What do he want?

  You got a tongue in your head, you ask him.

  She had small sharp shoulders and hands the size of a child’s and her reddish hair was filthy and shorn along her scalp where she must have cut it for the money. A flea-bitten child squalled at her thigh, tugged the hem of her dress. Its little knuckles blacked, its little face blacked.

  What do he want? the man called again.

  He don’t want the rent, she hollered, then scowled up at William. Well? What is it?

  I’m looking for someone, he said. He fished out a shilling. The woman who used to live here, he said, the old woman, the Negro. What do you know of her? Where did she go to?

  Her hand absorbed the coin as if it were water and she tilted a sudden coy glance at him, slid one arm along the door jamb. He saw now she could not be older than sixteen.

  You want to come in and talk bout it, mister? she asked. You just come right in, like.

  I was here last week, he said. He stepped back and stared down the hallway and then looked at the girl. I talked to her last week. Right here.

  Last week, was it.

  She never said anything about leaving.

  Goddamnit Maggs, the man called from within. Shut that damned door.

  You wait, she barked over her shoulder. She peered back up at William with an expression of disgust. Last week’s a lifetime ago, isn’t it. All we was told was no one got theirselves murdered in here an the rooms was available right away. Never asked no other questions. She were a Negro?

  He nodded.

  A Negro woman?

  He nodded.

  Well she ain’t hidin in the fireplace an we ain’t cooked her an ate her. She shook her head as if giving up on him and started to shut the door.

  He put out his hand, held the door fast. She didn’t just vanish, he said.

  The girl shrugged angrily.

  People do, she said.

  He came out of the tenement with his hackles prickling as if some shadow watched him through the haze but he could see no one. He took two steps backward into the muck of the street and squinted up at Snow Fields, its broken lightless panes, looking for Sally’s window. His entire life he had lived with the knowledge that vanishings were real, that people disappeared. Why it should astonish him now he could not say. He trudged up Tooley Street and at Vine stopped and looked around him, uneasy, the air reeking with the sludge of the river, the buildings leaning crazily out of the fog. Wherever Sally had gone she had left her furniture behind and he did not know if this meant she was dead or had simply lighted out for other lodgings. The hell with it, he thought sharply. It had been years since he had seen her and whatever her love for his father she owed William nothing. There were figures drifting past now at the edges of the buildings but he could not make out their faces. He could not quit himself of a growing dread that some figure lurked there behind him with malice in its heart and he ducked into a small court and crossed it quickly, his soles slipping in the mud. At a gap in the far railing he squeezed through and went down towards Pickle Herring Street and the small iron-walled kiosk of the pedestrian tunnel squatting there like some armoured outpost set over the river. The bridges he knew would still be open to foot traffic but the Tower Subway would be quieter and if he had been followed he would lose his shadow here. He glanced behind him, dipped his head, paid his halfpenny, and went down.

  It was a wooden spiral staircase that creaked under his steps and dislodged a fine sifting of dirt as he went. The brick walls were greasy with some filth, the gaslights in their blue globes sickly and dimming as he went deeper, as the air worsened. He came out into a vaulted chamber some fifty feet below the riverbank and stood staring at the round entrance of the iron tube as if staring at the threshold of some otherworld and then he peered back up the shaft of the stairwell to the small eye of light above him. In the tunnel were globe lights affixed naked to the riveted walls and visible from where he stood but even as he stepped through and began his slow walk under the river the air thickened into a grey haze.

  The corridor stretched on, eerie in its solitude. Twin rails ran the length, laid once for a cable omnibus now long in ruin.

  He could not shake the feeling that he was walking very gradually downhill, deeper into the earth, that the floor was lifting and falling under him like the deck of a vessel in a current. Through the tunnel’s iron walls he could hear the heavy thrump of a paddle steamer in the river above. When he looked behind him he could not see where he had set out from and when he turned back he could not see where he was going and that passage in its grey hopelessness seemed to go on forever.

  He heard them before he saw them. The crunch of their steps behind him, the huge rustle of their topcoats, a rasping cough. Hearing some purposeful thing in their approach and having known too many footpads to mistake it. He turned, fists bared, and waited. And then, through the haze: two monstrous figures, distorted and indistinct in the gloom, the sepulchral gas hissing behind them.

  He did not move and the two figures behind him stopped and he could hear the blood loud in his ears, feel the weight of the river crushing down through the clay.

  Show yourselves, he said.

  His voice echoing off the length of the tunnel.

  The two figures stood in their vague unsettling silence watching him from the haze. Then came a slight crunch of stones on the tiles underfoot and William felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck and he took a step back, knees bent, fists doubled.

  Show yourselves, by god.

  Mr. Pinkerton, a voice said.

  William withdrew his Colt and very deliberately in the long silence of that tunnel he cocked the hammer.

  There’ll be no violence from us, the man said softly, stepping forward into t
he light. I assure you of that, sir.

  The man who stood before him was small, narrow in the shoulders, thin-throated. His long whiskers were white, startling against his dark skin. He held an expensive silver-tipped walking stick in one hand and tucked a thumb into a satin waistcoat pocket with the other. The line of his mouth under the shadow looked worn, aggrieved, angry with some undefined hurt. William felt a kind of disquiet go through him. He did not put away his revolver.

  My name is Adam Foole, the small man said. I believe my manservant spoke with you. If you’ll forgive my seeking you out in this fashion—

  What do you want?

  The same as you, Mr. Pinkerton. To find the killer of Charlotte Reckitt.

  William’s eyes shifted to the other figure, massive, all stooped shoulder and thigh, his bowler hat crushed up against the ceiling. He knew that one at once. It was the ex-convict from the café. Tell your man to step forward, he said. Into the light. Where I can see him.

  There’s no need for that.

  Step forward, he called.

  The giant did not stir.

  He intends you no harm, Mr. Pinkerton, the man murmured. His shadowed eyes, his face emotionless in the gloom, his small hands very still. He neither wept nor remonstrated and instead a current of tension tightened in him and William recognized it as an authentic grief. I understand you are a serious man, sir, an effective man. That is why I have come to you. To ask for your assistance.

  I’m not for hire.

  I do not wish to be a client, Mr. Pinkerton. I wish to enlist your help. Privately.

  William’s eyes shifted coldly between the two men. He had not yet uncocked his revolver.

  It would be to your benefit also, sir.

  What’s your interest in Charlotte Reckitt?

  I beg your pardon?

  Your interest.

  My interest is in her killer. The small man paused, raised his face. Charlotte mattered to me once, he said. Our lives diverged. I have always regretted the path hers took. She was not a bad person, Mr. Pinkerton, and never a cruel one. Whatever her affiliations.

  William frowned. You and her, you were—

  Intimate. Yes. I am not ashamed of it.

  While he spoke William was listening for other sounds in the tunnel but he heard nothing. If there were others gathered in ambush they were not close. William could see the man’s bright eyes glittering in the shadow of his silk hat.