The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  “Murder is a rare event,” I remarked, as we entered the pie shop. The smell of hot meat and gravy seemed to intoxicate the lad, and I could see him swallowing the saliva it gave rise to in his mouth. “The only danger in the streets of London today is from pickpockets, for a young gentleman such as yourself.”

  His response was rueful. “Not a deal in my pockets for the Artful Dodger,” he smiled. Again, the casual reference to one of my own creations gave me a thrill. Regularly as it occurred amongst my peers and acquaintances, when it came from the lips of an unknown child, how could I refrain from preening?

  The pies purchased, we took them outside and returned to the waterfront, where the boy seemed ill at ease at such public consumption of victuals, despite being so obviously famished. His self-control was almost painful to witness, as he nibbled delicate morsels, glancing around furtively for any observers. I wolfed mine in a deliberate display of uncouth gusto, with the intention of giving him permission to do the same.

  Traffic on the river was heavy, with steamers and rowing boats dangerously adjacent. I scanned the water where the boy had described the dumping of a body, thinking that it would surely float to the surface in the constant stirrings from passing vessels, if it indeed existed. I wondered a little about the quality of his eyesight, affected as it might be by long hours in the dim light of his basement school. Had he emerged dazzled into the slanting dawn rays of the sun and seen a kind of mirage, which had been nothing more than a woman emptying slops?

  Our conversation flowed jerkily around the meat and pastry. I quizzed him on his experiences of Italy and Austria, and found to my surprise that he was familiar with many other Continental countries too. His father, it seemed, was a convinced traveller, taking the family hither and yon as the whim seized him. I disclosed a few details of my own, not least my recent journey down to Italy, with wife and five children, discovering in the process a great many shared adventures with the Baring-Gould entourage. Their current sojourn in England had already lasted over a year, it seemed, and young Sabine was pining badly for Alpine air.

  He was also increasingly agitated about his unauthorized absence from his classes. Mischievously, I suggested to him that he was a pupil at Dotheboys Hall, and could expect a thrashing from a second Wackford Squeers. His amusement was all too fleeting, and I recalled my assurances in the first moments of our encounter that I could render him a service by interceding with his masters.

  This I proceeded to do. Detaching a page from my pocket notebook, I penned a brief missive in flowery phrases, to the effect that young Master Baring-Gould had been unavoidably detained by myself, a distant cousin who had unexpectedly found himself in the metropolis, and wished for some company for an hour. Profuse apologies for my failure to make approaches through the proper channels, and – a last thought – the same uncle would enormously appreciate a second engagement in a few days’ time, if such could be arranged. I signed it with an illegible scrawl, bearing no resemblance to my actual nomenclature. For reasons I could not immediately perceive, I wished to conceal my identity from the boy for a while longer.

  “Will that do?” I asked him, letting him examine the note.

  He frowned. “They might believe that I wrote it myself,” he said.

  “Surely not? An honourable young gentleman such as yourself would never stoop to such dishonest behaviour.”

  He cocked his head as if suspecting a tease. Then he took the paper, bowed politely and trudged his reluctant way back to his gloomy imprisonment.

  For the next few days I was fully engaged by a host of demands on my time. Primary amongst them was my new venture – the establishment of a newspaper, with myself in position as editor. I had urgent messages from my publisher wishing to know the gist of my next Christmas Story, and my father was an ever-present figure in my life at that time, with his refusal ever to take a thing seriously. Small wonder, then, that I was in poor health, from the worry of it all.

  But I did not forget my new young friend. The fact that the boy was incarcerated in Somerset House connected him with my father’s past, and I mentioned it to him one evening.

  “Poor child,” he sighed. “The place still haunts my nightmares, to this day. He is in the basement, you say?”

  “He describes it with some bitterness,” I nodded. “I must make a few moments for a visit, if I can persuade his gaolers to release him to me.”

  My father gave a sudden chuckle. “I can show you a way in – if it has not been blocked up by this time. I was privy to a secret entrance, in my time there.”

  He began a tortuous explication of passages and flights of dank steps and a loose stone beneath one of the lower windows which would have graced one of Poe’s stories, if it had been told in a less tedious fashion. I laughed and shook my head. “I believe a simple note requesting the boy’s company might suffice,” I said.

  The following day I met with Fanny Kelly and my friend Jerrold, and enjoyed a session in a sedan where we reminisced about the play we had presented. Fanny was full of a scandal she had got from a friend of hers about a certain Mr Heron, with a house on the Strand and a rising career in banking. Fanny had once met the fellow and his wife near the Simplon Pass, of all places. It seemed the wife – a shrewish creature, by all accounts – had failed to fulfil an engagement at a society dinner in Mayfair the previous evening and, when enquiries had been made subsequently, there appeared to be a mysterious absence of the lady in question. Her husband had brusquely dismissed the manservant sent with a solicitous note, saying his wife had gone to visit her sister, who was indisposed. Here Fanny narrowed her eyes, and lowered her voice, “But the truth is, as my friend believes, that there has been a falling-out between husband and wife. She has heard a whisper of a liaison between Mr Heron and a certain young lady from Chelsea.”

  Poor Fanny had a most unsatisfactory audience for her tale. Jerrold and I were considerably more interested in gossiping about Maclise and the way he had disappointed us on the eve of our play rehearsals. But I took enough note of the Herons to keep them at the back of my mind over the next day or so, if only as an example of the kind of story that my own newly established newspaper would not lower itself to publish. It would instead focus on the more cultured aspects of society. At least, that was my ambition. With my father managing to inveigle himself a post on the staff, I could already see that the tone might sink lower than I hoped.

  It occurred to me that my new young friend might be legally free on a Saturday afternoon, and be permitted an outing with a relative with little difficulty. Indeed, regarded from the perspective of the accommodating Mr Hayes, it might be seen as a boon to have the child removed for a few hours. Accordingly, I despatched a note to the school requesting that Master Baring-Gould be released into my care from two to four pm that Saturday. My own motives remained obscure to me, but there was a nagging curiosity about his supposed sighting of a body being pitched into the river, from a point not more than a hundred yards from the residence of the politician and his mislaid wife.

  And the truth was that I felt sorry for the lad. There was more than a little of myself in him, but he had his own pale looks and lanky growth. I must have been three or four inches smaller at the same age. And, besides my pity, I wished to discover more of him and his family, which from what I had heard thus far seemed a little out of the ordinary. The idle father, journeying across the Continent in search of sunshine and cheap lodging, was of a class and breed I knew too little of. When I had ventured on a similar jaunt, earlier that same year, my wife had vowed never to undertake such an expedition again. What did Mrs B-G think of it, I wondered?

  He emerged from a flight of steps onto Lancaster Place, and glanced back at the building with such loathing that it shocked me to see it. He approached me tentatively, as if afraid I might evaporate before his eyes. “Is it not the ugliest building in the whole wide world, sir?” he demanded.

  “Not quite,” I demurred. “But I concede that it has few pretensions to b
eauty. My father detested it about as much as you appear to do.”

  The view from our vantage point presented a motley unfinished appearance, grimed with the smoke of London and the droppings of birds, a sorry vision by any standards. The construction of the Waterloo Bridge was largely to blame – previously no one could have seen the full horrors of the western side of the building.

  “Have you not viewed it from the opposite bank of the river?” I asked him. “From there, it appears almost handsome.”

  He was not persuaded. “It is infinitely worse within,” he insisted. “So dark and malodorous. We are more like moles than human beings, down beneath the ground.”

  “How long are you expecting to be here?”

  He shook his head. “I know not, sir. My father’s plans are never entirely reliable. My mother wrote to me saying she believes they will be in Warwick for many more months, and she is a little surprised to find herself in England for a second winter in succession. My father dislikes an English winter.”

  “You do not look altogether well,” I noted. As if to endorse my diagnosis, he coughed briefly. I myself had woken that day with some of my familiar malady upon me – a sense of giddiness behind my eyes and pressure in the middle of my head. But this child struck me as weak-chested and vulnerable to the noxious air of London. What were his parents thinking of, consigning him to this purgatory? Surely they must know how unwholesome it was for him?

  We wandered eastwards in an unspoken pact to revisit the pie shop on the Strand. An idea was forming of hiring a carriage and taking the air in Regents Park, for both our sakes. But my plan was quickly thwarted when the boy at my side gave a sudden start, and pressed himself close to me.

  “What is it?” I demanded.

  “That lady, sir.” He indicated a tall person in a magenta gown and bonnet walking on the opposite side of the street with an air of great purpose. “It is the same . . . the one I told you of . . .” he stammered incoherently, and it was a few moments before I grasped his drift.

  “Not the one you suspected of murder? How can you be sure?”

  “I remember her, sir,” he said simply. “I am in no doubt.”

  It seemed improbable to me, on several counts. I attempted to observe the person closely. She was walking in the same direction as ourselves, but it was not easy to keep pace hampered as I was by the shuddering lad hanging back, pulling at my arm. And constant passing traffic obscured my view.

  “Will we follow her, sir?” the lad quavered.

  Before I could reply, our quarry plunged into an alleyway leading to Covent Garden, and the approach of two carriages speeding dangerously towards us deterred me from attempting to cross the street. “We have lost her,” I said.

  “I am glad, sir,” said the boy. “She causes me great alarm.” He put a hand to his narrow chest as if already breathless.

  “It occurs to me that I should hear your tale again, in greater detail,” I said. “If you persist in its veracity, then I owe you the courtesy of listening more closely. Have you disclosed it to anyone else since we last met?”

  He smiled thinly and shook his head. “I have no one I could talk to of such things,” he confessed. “The other boys regard me as a curiosity and a weakling. I find them abhorrent.” He shuddered expressively, and I had a momentary glimpse of this pale young gentleman standing on the sidelines of the rough and tumble of school life.

  “We will find a place to sit quietly and talk,” I suggested, finding the idea immensely appealing, after the hurly-burly of the past few weeks, with a great deal more still in prospect.

  “If this were Austria or Italy, I should suggest we find a pretty little church,” he said, with a sudden lift in his tone that took me by surprise. I had never before encountered a young boy with a feeling for church aesthetics. “There are so many there,” he added wistfully. “But in London they are dark and ugly and ungodly.”

  “Not all of them,” I protested mildly, having scant fondness for churches myself in any general way. “Let me show you a favourite of mine.” I led him to St Clement Dane’s, to the east of where we were standing by barely a quarter of a mile. “You must surely know of this example of Wren’s work, being within a few yards of your school,” I said.

  He blinked in some confusion. “We attend church close to Mr Hayes’ home in Queen’s Square,” he said. He was gazing up at the church steeple as if he had never seen it before.

  We went inside, where the light was the first thing that struck us. Plain glass in the windows and a circular apse made it a delightful place to be on a fine day. The boy breathed deeply for the first time since I had met him, and spread his arms in an unconscious gesture indicative of an expanding spirit in a spot that he found safe and welcoming. Then he pressed his hands together, and bowed his head in a silent prayer. Watching him closely, I thought I observed something very rare: an individual of genuine religious spirit. I was momentarily awed by this glimpse and stood well back from him. I felt fear, too – fear that he would not survive to manhood, if his parents continued to neglect him so cruelly and his chest succumbed to further onslaught. I saw before me, I believed, one of those children so often characterized as being “too good for this world”. Too sensitive to the callous violence of society, too early cast out from the sheltering arms of his family.

  And yet, there was a steely thread in him that gave me cause for hope. Intelligence burned in his eyes, and precocious opinions forged a powerful connection with the world around him. Young Sabine, it seemed, was eager to live and to learn.

  “The story,” I prompted him. “Sit here and tell me every detail. You’ll find me an attentive listener.”

  We sat side by side, but he turned to face me, his blue eyes frequently on mine, but also flickering from one area of the church to another, as if drawing sustenance from the calm beauty of the place.

  “Can you say precisely where the incident took place?” I asked, in the manner of a police officer, tucking in my chin and stroking an invisible moustache. I still missed the whiskers I had grown in Genoa and shaved off on my return to England. In my part as Captain Bombadil in the play I and my friends performed only a few days before the encounter with Master Baring-Gould, I wore false beard and moustache, regretting fiercely the authentic variety that had been so much less itchy.

  “On the pavement above the river,” he said with deplorable imprecision. “There is a house, and a—” he demonstrated with his hand, drawing a flat jetty in the air, “a place where a boat can be moored. I saw that tall lady come down to that place, dragging another lady, who was insensible. Or—” His face tightened “She could have been dead,” he whispered.

  I held up a finger. “Now, my boy, the part that most puzzles me is how this could occur in the full light of day with so many people present to observe the events. How could it be possible for a body to be cast into the river without apprehension by some public spirited individual?”

  “There was only me, sir,” he said softly. “I looked around for somebody to call to for assistance. There was no one.”

  “No one on the bridge? Or the Strand? No one passing on the river in a boat? Come now, this is not possible. What hour of the clock was it?”

  “It was not long past dawn, sir.”

  I stared at him. “Dawn? What in the world were you doing here at dawn? Had Mr Hayes not something to say to your leaving your lodgings so early?” I recalled that it had been not long past eight o’clock when I had first seen him.

  He winced. “I let myself out and walked from Queens Square, at first light. I left a message with the maidservant that Mr Hayes was not to worry about me, but that I had an urgent errand.”

  I saw the scene in my mind’s eye – a young lad on the deserted streets, enjoying the clear new day. True, there might be a handful of the more disreputable members of society lodged in doorways and gutters, but they would offer little threat after their night-time debauches. Again, I saw my own young self, on similar strolls in the first
light of day. But I also saw my own young Charley, alone in the London streets and a cold hand closed around my heart. This boy must have remained on the bridge for over an hour, if his story were to be credited, simply staring at the swirling water into which he believed a human body had been thrown.

  “You must promise me you will never do such a thing again,” I abjured him. “What would your mother have to say about it?”

  He shook his head miserably. “She would be distressed,” he sighed.

  “And so you arrived here, and waited for the school doors to be opened. You stood and watched the sun rising over the water, and you dreamed of Alps and spicy meats and cheeses that fill you with a sense of riches. You conjured your dear Mama’s features, and wondered how it was they had placed you here so carelessly.”

  “Exactly, sir,” he said, with no sign of surprise at my accurate thought-reading.

  “And you witnessed the commission of a murder, and knew not what to do about it.”

  “I thought perhaps it was all right, sir. That there are practices here that I do not understand. It was a lady, sir. Not a servant or a common person.”

  “Can you say which house she came from?”

  He shrugged helplessly. The houses on the south side of the Strand were a hotch potch, indeed, with their backs to the muddy shallows of the river, many of them grimed with London filth and the ordure of gulls.

  “Was the tide high or low?”

  “High, sir. Very high. The lady sank into the water until she disappeared.”

  “The dead lady, that is?”

  He nodded, his face twisted with worry. “What should I have done, sir?” he asked pathetically. “I doubt me that anyone would have believed my story.” He tilted his head. “Do you believe me, sir?”