Or perhaps the russet-capped fellow was pursuing a different line altogether. Ships here load and unload continuously to the song of rope on pulley, and as they do so their bottoms are filled or emptied of the ballast that keeps them stable upon the oceans. Since no ship receives ballast without the knowledge of somebody, Mr Batchem may have decided upon this as his next avenue of enquiry.
He had most likely already enquired at Trinity House (that monopoly of ballast upon the river) and learned that no outgoing ship named Aurora had requested gravel. That much was to be expected, though the thorough investigator always reassures himself of the obvious before delineating it so. The next logical step was to speak to the truckmen and ballast-heavers themselves – those grimy, gritty labourers in their collar-covering hats who toil with the shovel at a thousand portholes across the Port of London.
And here was such a pair at St Katharine’s, going about their work with a determined silence marred only by the rhythmical slench of the shovel’s edge into gravel and the occasional spatter of ballast against the wooden hull. Eldritch Batchem watched with admiration how the burly heavers cast their loads up from the barge with unerring accuracy, and with hardly an upward glance, through a narrow aperture into the lower holds of the ship, where another would be raking it level in near-total darkness.
Finally, a muffled voice came from inside the vessel and the heavers stopped their labour to wipe grit from their sweating brows and reach for bottles of beer beneath a canvas sheet. By and by, one of the pair saw that they were being observed from the quay and nudged the other, whose face was skyward with the last of the bottle draining into his throat.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Eldritch Batchem, meeting their gaze, ‘I admire your skill. Every man must have a skill, must he not? I myself am a detective.’
The two ballast-heavers looked up at the curiously dressed man and then at each other. If they had understood his words, they made no sign of wanting to reply.
‘I mean to say that your work with the shovel is most accurate. Do you work only here in the dock, or also among the wharfs of the river?’
Again, the two gentlemen looked blankly back at their interrogator.
‘I wonder if you gentlemen understand plain English? Or perhaps you have a foreman I may speak to rather than my disturbing your rest period any further . . . ?’
One of the men gestured towards the hull with a bottle-clasping hand.
‘Your master is inside there? May I cross into the vessel and seek him out?’
The answering shrug may have been an affirmative, or an expression of the purest indifference.
Eldritch Batchem bustled away from the ballast-heavers and towards the deck of the ship, whose hollow-sounding boards had evidently just been swabbed clean. There seemed to be not another soul on board.
‘Hello! I say – is anyone below decks?’ he called.
No answer.
He descended a rough wooden stairway into the murk and was assailed with the reek of dank wood, caulking and the cellar mustiness denoting the now empty ship’s most recent cargo of wine barrels. There was still no one to be seen, so he ventured still deeper, stepping carefully around the coils of rope and neat piles of bolstering timber that must have held everything in place on some storm-lashed crossing.
‘Ho! Hello! I am looking for the ballast man. Your two heavers advised me I may descend . . .’
Darker and deeper he went, until he might have been descending into the depths of the sea itself, where sunlight penetrates only dimly and where shadows may be abysses or leviathans. Down there in the vessel’s bowels, below the water level itself, one might indeed have been within the belly of a great fossilized beast, its ropy viscera and broad mossy ribs glistening with a perpetual mouldy sheen. The smell of the river now seemed stronger: the aroma of the gravel. By and by, a flickering light emerged from the depths: the lamp of the ballast-raker.
‘Hello there! I am Eldritch Batchem – you may have heard of . . . O! You surprised me!’
A rough-hewn and filthy face, made ghoulishly dysmorphic in the shadows of the lamp, had appeared in the frame of a still lower hatchway. It did not seem well disposed to any visiter, but this did not stop Eldritch Batchem venturing down the final steps into the gravel.
‘What in the name of C—— are you doing below decks?’ said the ballast-raker. ‘Are you a ——— fool? There is no civilians permitted on board. Be gone!’
‘Sir – if I may ask a simple question regarding any recent loading of ballast for a four-masted—’
‘Are you ——— deaf? I said be gone! This no place for a tourist. Go – or I will make you!’
‘There is no need for rudeness, sir. A crime has been committed and I am invest—’
The ballast-raker took two rapid crunching steps and grasped the front of Eldritch Batchem’s tweed jacket with a tremendous grip, drawing his face to within inches of his imminent victim’s.
‘I said be gone!’
‘This is intolerable! I am an investigator . . .’ said Mr Batchem, struggling for balance on the gravel while trying to prise the iron fist from his clothing. It looked rather like he was going to suffer an injury if he did not immediately heed the advice given.
Then something changed – something in the eyes of Eldritch Batchem.
What had previously been fear became something fearful. A dread calm came over him and he ceased his grappling with the other fellow for a moment . . . a moment that caused the assailant to himself pause, relax his grip, and seek the face of his ‘victim’, now set in an unsettling expression of dead-eyed rage.
With a strength giving lie to his proportions, Eldritch Batchem pushed with all his might and sent the ballast-raker careering into the ribs of the hull, where his head collided solidly with the timbers. He fell to his knees there, stunned, and put a hand to his profusely bleeding scull. In this other hand, he held one of his attacker’s gloves, pulled off during the violent encounter.
‘Perhaps that will teach you the cost of insolence!’ said Eldritch Batchem, restoring his clothing and demeanour to normality.
But the injured man, his head ringing and the blood trickling through his fingers, could not take his eyes from the bare ungloved hand brushing at the tweed jacket. At first, it was confusion that made him stare. Then, the more he looked, the queasier he began to feel.
Eldritch Batchem perceived the focus of the stare and swiftly put his hand in a jacket pocket. With a dark muttering, he then made to ascend the stairs back to the light, but turned before passing through the hatchway, his eyes again assuming that dark glare.
‘Tell a soul what you have seen, sir, and you will certainly regret it. That is a promise.’
THIRTEEN
It was about a year ago that a man crossing Waterloo-bridge took it into his head to hoist a loose kerbstone over the parapet into the river. Instead, it landed upon the scull of a young man standing on a ballast machine below, killing him outright. The same year, another man boasted to his fellows that he could walk the bridge’s length atop the parapet. He fell and drowned. Once again, in that same year, a heavily decomposed body was found under the second arch from the Surrey side. Nobody ever discerned the identity of that unfortunate. And we need not expand further upon the death of Samuel Scott on that selfsame span: accidentally hanged before a crowd of thousands in his own show of fearlessness.
In short, it might be said to be the most notorious among all the city’s great crossings. Ask any waterman plying his trade below its graceful ellipses and he will tell you: there are upwards of forty suicides annually from its lofty edge – and that does not account for the deaths upon it through accidents, the winter exposure of indigents or abandonment of infants. Is there a stretch of thoroughfare in any city in the world so blackened with ill fame as Waterloo-bridge?
Of course, it is not only death that finds associations along that granite span. It is also the bridge of lasciviousness, infamous for its assignations in the recesses after dark,
and for the torrent of common prostitutes who swarm north from Waterloo-road to the lights of Middlesex between seven and nine each evening, only to return at nine the next morning, crapulous and in disarray. It is a place where both innocence and lives are lost – a fine example of our city in miniature should one be required.
Yet during the day, it is as chaotic with traffic as any of the larger bridges. Not as busy as London-bridge, to be sure, but certainly noisy enough that Mr Williamson felt the urge to occasionally hold his hands over his ears as he ventured along the pedestrian walkway to the place where the newspapers (and Eldritch Batchem) had indicated the fatal incident had taken place.
If he looked deep in thought that morning, it was not the case of the Aurora that was uppermost in his mind. Indeed, he might not himself have been able to say which of the conflicting emotions in his head was the strongest. Was it the naked humiliation of being slandered in that article of the London Monitor? Was it the slur upon his proud record as a policeman and as a detective? Was it the accusation – whether true or not – that he had aided the escape of a felon?
Or was it the shameful and defamatory reference to his associations with prostitutes – with that prostitute? With Charlotte.
It was worrying enough that Eldritch Batchem – for it was surely he behind the article – knew so much about his competitors on the case. Evidently he had had them all followed or otherwise investigated in some depth. Was that the task of the curious Italian . . . ?
Mr Williamson paused suddenly, causing a number of people to stumble, muttering, behind him on the bridge. What if it had been no coincidence that he had been distracted that night outside the Queen’s Theatre? He had assumed that the incident had been purely accidental – it was, after all, her pitch. But what if the Italian and Eldritch Batchem had somehow inveigled Charlotte into serving their purpose, knowing that she would certainly catch her victim’s eye – and that he would react as he did?
‘Stand aside, won’t yer, mate?’ shouted a man brushing swiftly past Mr Williamson (who was still quite stationary in the centre of the pedestrian walkway).
He moved absently out of the flow to the stone balustrade overlooking the river and laid a hand on its cold surface. One fact in particular did not make sense to him: the episode outside the theatre had happened two days before any mention of the missing brig had been made. Could Eldritch Batchem really have been observing him for so long? And, if so, for what earthly reason? The questions multiplied until they questioned themselves . . .
This would not do. Mr Williamson called upon years of experience and attempted to clear his thoughts of all confusion. There was a case to be solved, and the solution to it would likely bring all other mysteries to a conclusion. Today, the death of Mr William Barton was the thing. He began to walk once again.
It seemed frankly ridiculous to assume that he would find any physical evidence there among the rolling wheels, clopping hooves and persistent footfalls of thousands, but a detective will always check before he is sure. And as he looked at the roadway of compacted dung cut into ragged ruts by carriage wheels, he knew that all trace of William Barton was forever vanished.
Behind him, a pedestrian recess stood empty – the one in which Eldritch Batchem had claimed to find an earring – and he stepped into it to be away from the pedestrians. Could it be that someone had lurked in this very space for hours, seeing the fog descend and waiting, waiting for the expected footfall of the tidewaiter? Certainly, it did not seem to be the sort of thing a lady wearing earrings would do.
He examined the walls of the recess and, as expected, found nothing indicative there. Indeed, from this vantage, the view along the bridge itself was limited: one would have had to peer out continuously to see someone coming . . . and the fog would, in any event, have made such caution quite unnecessary. Similarly, the high walls of the recess (a deterrent to suicides) made visibility of the river or city to the east difficult. Anyone waiting to see or hear a signal that the victim was approaching would, in fact, have been inconvenienced by being in the recess (even if there had not been a fog).
Mr Williamson’s keen brain examined the problem from all points of view. If the theory of the recess-lurker was doubtful, perhaps Benjamin’s suggestion of the killer escaping over the side was the correct solution.
He stepped out on to the walkway once more and turned his attention instead to the stone balustrade on each side. He first moved northwards, examining each inch of the masonry for any sign, not knowing at all what he was looking for, but knowing he would recognize it when he saw it. After ten yards or so of nothing unusual, he retraced his steps and conducted the same meticulous search southwards. He did not look for long.
Three yards beyond the recess, he came upon a small peculiarity in the stone: a jagged indented hole taken out of the granite. He pressed a finger into it and noted that the lack of grime suggested it was relatively recent. On one knee now, he examined the walkway beneath the hole and confirmed what he expected to be the case: there were a few tiny chips remaining where they had fallen. No doubt the larger piece had long since been kicked away by pedestrians. In the fog and the damp, Eldritch Batchem clearly hadn’t noticed it at all – or simply not given it any further thought.
Mr Williamson smiled ruefully to himself. He had been wrong because he had not considered the most unrealistic of all possible solutions.
A hole of this kind did not suggest escape at all, but arrival. Granite is an exceptionally hard stone and would not have been so scarred by having an iron slipped over it. Scratched, possibly, but not chipped. No – a grappling iron must have been tossed up from the river itself and landed at this spot with a chisel-like impact – an impact loud enough to be heard by the toll-collector in the silence of the night. Eldritch Batchem’s assumption that the noise had been the razor hitting the parapet when thrown by the dying man now seemed even more ludicrous.
Mr Williamson placed both hands on the parapet and peered over to check the stonework there. What he saw caused him to smile again. There were a number of greasy scuff marks where it seemed someone had braced their shoes against the stonework to climb the final stretch before the parapet. And was that also the merest suggestion of where a tarred rope had abraded against the lip of the edge, leaving a murky line? Such marks would have been difficult to see in the pale dawn, and even more invisible with the bridge stained by rain or fog. But in the clear daylight, the marks could not be denied.
Nevertheless, it was a feat to be disbelieved by any rational man. What manner of being would be able to toss an iron and rope thirty-five feet upwards in a dense fog and hit the balustrade? What manner of human monkey would be able to scale a rope swinging half under the great gaping arch and, furthermore, to descend, probably onto a boat moored mid-stream? The iron would then have had to be disengaged from the balustrade with an immense whip of the rope. The whole would have required a colossal feat of strength, balance and nerve – and also of determination. Why not simply cudgel the fellow as he walked along a darker street?
More and more, the murder of William Barton seemed to be a significant one. Mr Williamson took out his notebook and added what he had seen, estimating measurements and peering over the side once more to be sure of his bearings. In a moment, he would go below the bridge to do what Eldritch Batchem had not, but for now there was the toll-collector Mr Weeton to be questioned.
Having enquired at the Bridge Company offices, Mr Williamson had learned that Mr Weeton was still working the night shift, although he had put in a request to move to days. That duty was to conclude in a matter of minutes, so Mr Williamson hurried towards the Middlesex side, weaving between pedestrians that he might not miss his opportunity.
He was just in time, catching the toll-collector as he was about to leave the toll-house.
‘O, I have already spoken to the fellow in the red hat,’ said Mr Weeton, ‘and to a gentleman from the police. I have told all I know.’
‘I would be most grateful if you
could spare just a few moments more to answer my questions also,’ said Mr Williamson, still panting slightly from his progress across the bridge.
‘Are you a newspaperman? I have been instructed by Mr Blackthorne not to speak with any—’
‘My name is George Williamson. I—’
‘Wait – I have heard that name . . . Are you the same fellow who worked on the Lucius Boyle case. The detective? I have read all about it.’
‘I am he. I will not take more than ten minutes of your time . . .’
‘O, all right – but only because you are a detective. I am a furious enthusiast of such work and read everything I can on the subject. But let us step back inside the toll-house. Timpkins will not mind, and it is a little quieter inside.’
The aforementioned Timpkins was the toll-collector just beginning his duty, and he was busy enough at the toll-gate to offer just the merest nod as the two men went inside the house to take seats by a small cast-iron stove that smelled of coal smoke. Once settled, Mr Williamson removed his hat and turned to a fresh page in his notebook.
‘As I say, sir, I told everything to that Mr Batchem,’ said Mr Weeton. ‘I am not sure how I can help you.’
‘With respect, you may have answered his questions, but you did not necessarily tell him everything you know. The questions can be as important as the answers. Let us begin with the sound you heard – it was metal on stone, is that right?’
‘Indeed. I am told it was the razor hitting the parapet.’
‘Is that what it sounded like to you? Would you have heard such a minor sound from some hundreds of yards away?’
‘The fog plays tricks with sound, sir. It was late . . . I was afraid . . . Mr Batchem has said—’
‘Hmm. If I were to take a razor and strike it against the stone now, would it sound the same? Or was the sound more like something being dropped – something heavy like a chisel or pry bar?’
The Thieves' Labyrinth (Albert Newsome 3) Page 14