Convicted Innocent

by Meggie Taylor

  * * * * *

  “Something is the matter with me, Lew. I think you know when it began.”

  David had continued speaking to his friend for what had to be hours. The daylight in their cell faded to twilight and then night; lamplight from the adjoining room splintered the darkness through the hole in the wall.

  He had reminisced further about their shared youth, about his studies abroad, about the exploits of his nieces and nephews that his sisters and brother had so thoughtfully passed along, and was about to start a new tale when he realized there was a subject he couldn’t avoid any longer.

  “A man can face any manner of horrors if they don’t touch his soul, but that accident…” David scrubbed a hand over his face. “The train, two years ago….”

  His friend grunted.

  “The world shifted that morning. Since then a thousand petty things have happened that make it ever harder to understand the ‘why’ of anything.”

  David heard a rustle in the gloom and then Lewis’s hand gripped his arm briefly.

  “Not your fault,” his friend whispered. “Have hope.”

  The priest shivered but said nothing; the silence lengthened between them. He knew the accident hadn’t been his fault. Logically, anyway. He couldn’t have known what would happen. Even so….

  After a time, David noticed his friend’s breathing ease. He glanced down; Lewis had fallen asleep.

  Shaking his head, David stood, stretched, and went to draw himself a sip of water from what little they had left when his friend began coughing. The fits had grown steadily worse as the day wore on, and this was the worst yet.

  The priest stood still for a moment, overwhelmed with helplessness.

  Useless.

  No. Not entirely, anyway.

  He could do what his friend had asked of him, at least in part, so he started forward with slightly more energy than an automaton.

  He cradled Lew’s head and shoulders as the man struggled ever more weakly to breathe, to cough away whatever was filling his lungs. It was a long fit. When it at last subsided, David wiped his friend’s mouth with the cuff of his own sleeve, and then stared uncomprehendingly at the dark stain that streaked the fabric. He held his arm up to the light.

  Blood, he realized, a tiny voice in his head screaming in unbound horror. He is drowning.

  And something snapped inside him.

  Laying his friend back down ever so gently, David lurched to his feet and over to the oblong slit in the wall.

  “I know someone’s back there!” he bellowed, putting his mouth near the hole. “I’ve heard you mucking about in there; heard you tell us to keep silent or else; heard you come and go – but enough! Your crew leader told me to keep Lewis alive after he’d been ripped to pieces by you lot, and I’ve done all I can. Only a doctor could keep him alive now!”

  David paused, his fury making him shake.

  “What good is his life? To you, it’s so much rubbish. But someone in this place has plans for him, for the pair of us. Else we’d have been dead last evening when we tried to flee. Would you ruin those plans with his untimely death? Tell me!”

  David stopped to listen, to determine if his bitter words were finding an audience...or just echoing into an empty room.

  He heard voices, though: muttered exclamations and arguing, a shout for him to be silent, and then a shout for that speaker to be silent.

  “I demand a doctor for my friend!” David roared. “A surgeon! A physician! Any man of medicine!”

  The priest would’ve kept shouting, only the door to his cell smashed open and the blond fellow strode in with a light in hand. Three others followed, and two of these crowded the clergyman against the wall, pinning him there.

  The blond chap placed his light on the floor and leaned over the policeman briefly. He straightened, thoughtfulness pinching his narrow features. Saying a few low, quick words to the chap at his elbow, the blonde then departed without a glance at the priest.

  He left the door open. The other thugs stayed where they were. Waiting. Silent.

  “Going to finish us off now?” David asked, his voice sharp with anger. “Got your jollies making an honest man suffer so? Want to see a clergyman grovel? Why—”

  A fist in his stomach cut David’s tirade off sharply and bent him double. When he straightened, winded, another blow drove him to his knees.

  “Fancies ‘imself an honest man, don’t ‘e?” The thug who’d struck him sneered to his comrade. Both men had the heavy hands and slab-like shoulders and chests of bruisers-for-hire, and looked quite ready to demonstrate their professional expertise. The third fellow, a slimmer man with the face of a ferret, merely looked bored.

  “Not me,” David panted, slowly rising to his feet. “My friend is the honest one. I’m just… I’m just a hypocrite.”

  “What?” the first thug said.

  “Did ‘e jus’ call us some’ing foul?” the second returned.

  “No! I—”

  But a backhanded strike aborted David’s reply and snapped his head to one side. It seemed the two thugs were simply hunting for an excuse to work him over.

  “Don’t fink we likes bein’ tol’ to lay off, vicar,” the first growled. “Boss said ‘halive,’ but Hi can go a long way afore you gets to ‘dead.’”

  The two began to beat David.

  All of a sudden, the priest was afraid. Not of the hurt raining down on him, but that these thugs would leave him unable to fulfill his promise to his dear, dying friend.

  And David feared that his own ill-considered, despair-spurred anger would’ve driven them to it.

  Sunday morning

  Hildy went to bed after sitting up with him for a half hour or more, but Inspector Tipple gave up on sleep altogether.

  He thought a change of pace might freshen his thoughts on the Harker affair, so he sat down at his desk and pulled out files from different cases. Perusing other problems should jog his intuition and grant him a new perspective. After all, the technique had worked in the past.

  However, Horace saw only the details that reminded him of the murderer who’d slipped through his fingers – was that only the day before yesterday? – and one of the case files even included a suspect sketch done by Lewis Todd. There was no mistaking that boy’s handiwork, even if the drawing wasn’t signed, and Horace dropped the file on his desk with a sigh.

  Ignoring the matter of Nicholas Harker and Lewis Todd – and Lewis’s friend, the vicar – was impossible. In the night’s silence, he could almost hear them begging to be found.

  The telephone rang; Horace nearly started out of his chair at the jarring shrill.

  He snatched the receiver from its hook before the second ring (poor Hildy) and leaned toward the call box, which was fastened to the wall above his desk.

  “Sir,” came the clipped greeting. Of course it was one of Horace’s policemen: no one else would be calling at half-past three on a Sunday morning. He recognized the voice of Sergeant John Nolan.

  “Sorry to wake you, sir,” Nolan went on, “but you asked that we ring you if anything further developed.”

  “Do tell.”

  What the sergeant then related had Horace Tipple at the station by four o’clock.

  Nolan greeted him at the door and together they walked up to the first floor, the station still busy despite the early hour. (After all, a manhunt for a murderer was underway, and a brother policeman was missing.) Nolan was a steady, sturdy fellow not much younger than Horace; they began speaking as soon as they reached a table to one side of the floor’s open expanse. The bobbies who’d been clustered about it made way when the detective drew near.

  “The coroner did confirm the identity of the body, sir.” The sergeant said, handing a sketch he’d taken from one of several sheaves of paper on the tabletop to the inspector.

  Horace looked at the drawing (yet another one of Lewis’s) and frowned. “Frank O’Malley. He’s been a person of interest?”

  Nolan nodded. “Ser
geant Todd put together a folio of all the Harkers and their prime lackeys as they figured into the case since we had photographs of only a few. He sketched O’Malley when the chap insisted on coming forward as a character witness for Nicholas Harker.”

  “Ah, yes,” Horace nodded. “I remember hearing of his vehement determination…. He wasn’t a material witness, though, was he?”

  “No. He was in a pub in Bethnal Green at the time of the murder. But he was Harker’s impromptu guardian after the boy’s mother died several years ago and was adamant the young man couldn’t have killed anyone, let alone one of the family’s chief underworld competitors. Of all the family’s proclamations of the boy’s innocence, O’Malley’s were the most vigorous.”

  “And now he’s dead.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “The coroner says it’s the same manner and method used by Nicholas Harker to kill Milo Gervais: a throat cut by a heavy knife.”

  While that methodology itself wasn’t particularly unique, the style of the knife stroke had been. On account of it (and with the help of a mortician who kept extensive notes), Horace had been able to link Gervais’s murder with several others, all of which formed the foundation of his case against Nicholas Harker and the Harker empire as a whole.

  Before he voiced what he found so glaringly problematic about Mr. O’Malley’s death, Horace asked, “Where was the body?”

  “Constable Little interrupted a group of men attempting to dump it in the river off Nightingale, sir,” a plainclothes detective sergeant, Eustace Bradtree, chimed in. Missing one of his front teeth, Bradtree whistled a bit when he said his S’s. “They fled as soon as they heard his shout, but they hadn’t finished their work.”

  “Little is one of Sergeant Todd’s men?” Horace asked, almost absently, as he turned to the large, detailed map of the East End tacked to the wall behind him.

  “Yes, sir. He helped Lewis put that folio together, so he recognized O’Malley and asked the coroner to speed his work,” Bradtree whistled. “Only brought the body in a few hours ago. Seems to have been dead about a day. Also, the abandoned cart was found in a nameless alley near Sheridan Street.”

  “We’re certain that cart is linked to the case?” The inspector half-turned back toward his men.

  “As we can be, sir.” Bradtree nodded to a mud-smudged police helmet sitting on the table amid the paperwork and other odds-and-ends. “That was stashed in the back. Has Sergeant Todd’s name inked in the lining.”

  Horace nodded and turned back to the map. He located Nightingale Lane where it brushed the Thames on the map and chewed his lip in thought.

  The Harkers had holdings throughout the East End (if primarily in Whitechapel): they were highlighted on this map, as was the trail of the false police wagon in which Nicholas Harker had escaped from Holloway Prison, and the side street where the abandoned cart had been found an hour or two before. The alley where Lewis Todd had presumably disappeared and the Clerkenwell police station were also marked.

  Holloway, Clerkenwell, and the Old Bailey were a few miles to the northwest of Whitechapel on the other side of the Old City. The police wagon’s path had been traced as far as central Whitechapel before it petered to nothing somewhere between Turner Street and Raven near London Hospital.

  The five points were nowhere near each other and bore no noticeable relationship to any of the Harker properties.

  Not allowing the map’s inconclusiveness to drive him to frustration, Horace turned back to his men. “Are all the Harkers’ holdings on this map? Current and past?”

  Sergeant Nolan thought for a moment in his plodding, steady way. “Current, yes sir, and we have as many men as possible keeping an eye on them with assistance from J, N, and K divisions. We didn’t mark some of the Harkers’ old premises – which we’re also not watching – such as that burned out factory in Bethnal Green, the warehouses in St. George’s they sold to MacDermott Incorporated last autumn, or the abandoned tunnels some fool of a Harker dug in the sixties to meet up with the West End Underground.”

  “Why not the last? Seems an excellent place in which to hole-up.”

  Detective Sergeant Bradtree chimed in again. “Most of that was taken over by developing sewer lines, bricked in, or absorbed as lower levels of existing street-level structures and walled off from the rest of the tunnel system. I’ve heard what’s left in the Harkers’ asset portfolio is a series of isolated labyrinths, numbering perhaps a dozen or more. Very difficult to access discreetly, though doable with aid. Also, problematic for us to monitor.”

  Horace chewed his lip some more. “Has the coroner stated whether he might be able to determine where our deceased has been recently?”

  Nolan and Bradtree looked at each other.

  “I’ll ask him, sir,” Bradtree whistled for the both of them.

  “Very well. Also, consider where a fugitive might find the means to hide himself, as well as enjoy the ability to enter and exit with relative ease without alerting the public.”

  Several heads around the table nodded.

  “Now,” Horace said, returning to one of the many and multiplying issues that bothered him, “why do you think Harker would kill – rather, personally execute – one of his greatest supporters only two days after escaping police custody?”