‘Hmm. I believe it would be more useful to ask our fellows here about wharfs along the river. Have you not already done so?’
‘I was about to. Gentlemen – I have no doubt that you have worked on vessels up and down the river. If I were to ask you to name wharfs where both tobacco and muscovado sugar are loaded – or in neighbouring warehouses, say – would that be a large number?’
The three ballastmen assumed expressions of cogitation, sorting through the catalogues of riverine locations in their heads. As they did so, Noah cast a surreptitious glance of concern at Mr Williamson, who was now disinterestedly fixated on the beery throng of the Forecastle. A man of characteristically grey moods, the ex-detective sergeant had seemed darker of late. Even the oddity of this latest discovery appeared not to rouse him.
‘Well, there’s Pickle Herring,’ said the ballast-raker. ‘They ’ave a bit of most things there.’
‘Indeed,’ said Noah, ‘but there is also a quantity of coal landed there and we are not looking for coal dust.’
‘What about Nine Elms wharf?’ said one of the heavers. ‘Moggach’s warehouse ’as sugar and tobacco, don’t it?’
‘No, it ’as tobacco and rum,’ said the ballast-raker. ‘There are the West India Docks, of course, but their tobacco and sugar stores are at a distance from each other if I remember.’
‘Fryin’ Pan wharf at Wappin’,’ offered the heaver who had not yet spoken. ‘I seen ’em unloadin’ everythin’ there: tobacca, wool, sugar, silks, furs . . . not coal. Never seen coa—’
There was a sudden pause. The ballast-raker had cast a severe look at the speaker. Noah caught it, and Mr Williamson evidently sensed it, turning his attention back from the parlour to the table.
‘Who has a warehouse at Frying Pan wharf?’ said Noah as nonchalantly as he could.
‘O, it’s not so much a ware’ouse,’ said the ballast-raker with a careless gesture of the hand. ‘Vessels sometimes stop there if their proper berth is taken, you know. At least, that’s what I’ve ’eard.’
‘And do Custom House officials receive ships there officially?’ said Mr Williamson with renewed attention.
‘If the ship ’as a landin’ warrant, why not?’ said the ballast-raker. ‘I deal in ballast, sir – I don’t pay attention to things that don’t concern me. Fryin’ Pan wharf doesn’t concern me. It’s none of our business, is it, mates?’
The two heavers shook their heads mutely and stared at the tabletop.
‘Hmm,’ said Mr Williamson.
‘Well . . . can I buy you another drink, gentlemen?’ said Noah with a clap of his hands.
‘No. I think it’s time for the rats,’ said the ballast-raker, fumbling earnestly for his watch.
At that very moment, the barman rang a large brass ship’s bell and a thrill of excitement passed through the parlour. Dogs recognized the sound and began barking. A door was thrown open and a slow rolling thunder of boots began to sound across the wooden floor towards the stairs led, it seemed, by three eager ballastmen.
‘Shall we adjourn above?’ said Noah to Mr Williamson.
‘I suppose we might,’ replied the latter.
‘What is the matter, George? You are quite unlike yourself. Did you not just observe that awkwardness when the heaver mentioned Frying Pan wharf? I would not be surprised if every river worker here knows more than the police about the disappearance of that brig . . . and you are the man to extract it from them. Have you seen any sign of Batchem or the Italian?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, that is perhaps to our advantage. Let us follow the throng upstairs and see what else we can learn. Tomorrow, we will meet with Ben and Mr Cullen to gather all we know.’
‘You have not yet spoken with Benjamin?’
‘No, but that is not unusual. If he is not still at Ludgate-hill, he will be at a theatre somewhere. I will speak to him later. Now – let us make haste . . .’
The two joined the remaining enthusiasts in venturing up the narrow wooden staircase to the room above, which presented a scene even more populously cacophonous than the parlour had been. In the centre was a pit of about six feet in diameter with a waist-high rim encircling it and a large gas chandelier suspended centrally above. All around the pit, men sat on banked benches or stood leaning over the rim to loudly debate the merits of the sturdy bulldog that sniffed about the white-painted floor within.
Noah indicated that they should take different viewing positions and Mr Williamson ascended one of the benches to take a seat between a bulky fellow with coal dust glistening in his beard and an American sailor in a red worsted shirt who introduced himself with a wink and a gobbet of chewing tobacco that narrowly missed the detective’s shoes. Pipe smoke twisted beneath the startling illumination of the gas chandelier and there was a powerful smell of gin in the air.
‘Welcome, welcome all!’ came a shout from the doorway: the portly landlord himself.
A colossal cheer and stamping of feet went up and the assembled dogs again began their chorus of anticipation.
‘Tonight, we will see some fine examples of the rat-killing art,’ said the landlord, ‘including my own precious terrier Claymore, who will attempt fifty rats in five minutes! But first, perhaps some of you will try your animals. Who is this in the pit? A fine bulldog, it seems. Is he a brave one?’
‘He is called Prince,’ shouted a fellow at the rim, evidently the owner. ‘I will try him on ten rats.’
‘Very well – let us test his mettle. The rats, the rats – bring the rats!’
The volume in the room rose higher as the audience scrutinized the animal before them and placed bets on whether Prince would kill all of his rats. Meanwhile, a singular personage came through the door hoisting a writhing canvas sack over his shoulder. The fellow, who seemed to walk lightly upon his toes, could have been no taller than five feet and wore a long, thick beard that extended south to his sternum and north almost to his eyes. Long wiry hair stood out alarmingly from his scalp and reached down to touch his shoulders. As he passed through the crowd, dogs growled and worried at his heels.
‘Mr Baudrons – have you got some good ones for us?’ shouted the landlord with a theatrical gesture.
The hairy little man nodded and continued to the pit, where he climbed over the rim with the aid of some wooden steps. Once inside, he indicated that Prince’s owner should restrain him until the ten rats could be extracted. He then unbound the neck of the twitching sack and reached in with a bare hand to extract the first of the damp and filth-matted vermin by its thick brown tail. With each successive rat, the room became more and more suffused with the putrid stench of the sewer until ten of the abominations huddled in a roiling mass of fur and tails by the pit’s rim.
By now, dogs all over the room were whimpering or barking at the unholy aroma and speculation among the crowd had reached a hiatus. Meanwhile Noah and Mr Williamson used the general focus upon the arena to cast their eyes over the crowds for any sign of their Italian in disguise. Of him, however, there was no sign among the motley gathering – though there was another present whose atrocious bodily odour was to some degree now masked by the smell of the rats.
He named Baudrons climbed back out of the ring and signalled to the landlord with a nod.
‘Release the dog! Let Prince seek his coronation!’ shouted the landlord.
A cheer erupted and the bulldog approached the seething pile with dainty caution. Unsure, he put an exploratory nose to it . . . but withdrew a mere second later, yelping and dancing madly about with a rat attached firmly to his snout.
A great laugh of derision erupted from the crowd and continued as Prince sought urgently to prise the creature from his nose with a flailing paw. The humiliated owner reached urgently into the pit and jabbed his pocket knife at the rat, whereupon it let go and scuttled back to the group seemingly none the worse for wear. Prince, however, had had quite enough and sat licking at his nose with no more interest in the proceedings.
‘T
hat was rather a poor show,’ said Noah to the man standing next to him at the pit’s edge: the fellow called Baudrons.
‘I have no resspect for dogz, ssir,’ replied the diminutive fellow. ‘Foolissh animalz, they are. A good cat would not cower sso before an animal but a quarter of itz ssize. I ssupply the ratz, certainly, but I have no regard for the dogz.’
‘They are sewer rats, are they?’
‘Indeed, ssir. They are the mosst obsstreperouss ssince they musst fight for their food. Your ditch and river rat iss fat and sspoilt in hiss fare.’
‘I expect you are quite an authority on the matter.’
‘Not esspecially, ssir. Catz are my province. I am cat masster at the London Dock.’
‘Is that right? A terrible business two days past, was it not? In fact, you must have been about your duties at around the time the crimes in the furnace were perpetrated. I wonder if you saw or heard anything?’
‘I have already sspoken to the Thamez Police on the matter.’
‘The Thames Police? Perhaps you mean the Detective Police . . .’
‘Not at all. A red-haired fellow in uniform, he waz. Quite impertinent, and no friend to catz. He ssmelled of boatz.’
‘Inspector Newsome,’ said Noah.
Another enormous cheer interrupted their conversation as a feisty terrier (a substitute for the tremulous Prince) tossed a dead rat over the rim into a fellow’s lap. Noah took the opportunity to wave across at Mr Williamson and indicate that he should come to join them.
‘I don’t recall hiss giving a name,’ said Mr Baudrons.
‘On what did he question you?’
‘Az you ssay: about the night of the deathss. I ssaw nothing.’
‘And that was the extent of your conversation with him?’
‘That, and a tooth he wanted to know about.’
‘A tooth? A human tooth?’
‘No, ssir – an animal’z tooth he found. Very likely a lion or tiger, I would ssay.’
Noah looked dubiously at the pinched and hirsute face of his interlocutor. It seemed to show no signs of guile or deception.
Mr Williamson arrived meanwhile and stood alongside, shaking his head at Noah’s raised eyebrow of enquiry: no, there was still no sign of the Italian or of Eldritch Batchem.
‘This is a fellow of mine,’ said Noah to Mr Baudrons. ‘He is a genuine detective – not a uniformed policeman. George – this gentleman is the cat master of London Dock and has been interviewed by Inspector Newsome about a large animal tooth. What do you make of that?’
At the name of his former superior, Mr Williamson blinked and seemed to return from his hitherto abstracted realm. ‘Hmm. Inspector Newsome is indeed a curious man. Did he reveal where he found the tooth or to what it might pertain?’
‘He did not, ssir, though he assked me if ssuch a large animal might live in the ssewerz, and about the sstoriez of the mudlarkz. They claim to ssee footprintz in the mud, you know.’
Noah and Mr Williamson exchanged a glance of mutual bafflement. Had Mr Newsome’s descent into uniform rendered the man insane?
‘And did he seem to suggest that this tooth was in any way connected to his investigation into the deaths in the spirit vault or Queen’s Pipe?’ said Noah.
‘No, ssir. No indication of that at all.’
A reverberating collective yell filled the room. The landlord’s champion terrier Claymore was about to enter the pit and Mr Baudrons excused himself to fetch a fresh consignment of rats from downstairs.
‘What do you make of that?’ said Noah, looking swiftly around the banked benches to see if anyone had been watching their conversation with Mr Baudrons.
‘I admit I have no idea,’ said Mr Williamson, ‘but whatever else he may be, the inspector is not stupid. There must be something in his enquiries. The sewers, the mud banks . . . could there be some connection with that body he apparently pulled from the river?’
‘It is the only connection I can think of. But how to proceed . . . ?’
Mr Baudrons entered the room once more, this time aided by another man in carrying a large rusting wire cage that teemed with claws, wet fur and thick cable tails. Together they traversed the wooden stairs into the pit and poured the heaving brown mass onto the ground, where it swarmed briefly in exploratory arcs before instinctively forming a protective mound. The crowd cheered appreciatively at the general size and robustness of the specimens, and Mr Baudrons took a small bow.
But as he raised his head from that bow, he seemed to pause as if remembering or sensing something. His eyes seemed to flicker across one quadrant of the benches, and then he retired from the pit so that Claymore might try his luck at fifty rats. Noah, however, had caught the moment and touched Mr Williamson’s arm.
‘Another good selection of vermin,’ said Noah as Mr Baudrons rejoined them.
‘Yess, all quite filthy and dizeazed . . .’ came the somewhat distracted reply.
‘Did you notice somebody you know in the crowd just then, Mr Baudrons? I saw you look up into the crowd.’
‘No . . . no, it waz a ssmell.’
‘The smell of the rats? They are quite pungent, are they not?’
‘Not the ratz. They have their own disstinct aroma. No – I have ssmelled that other ssmell before: ssomething of the ssewerz, but with a human sscent alsso. Mosst unpleasant. It waz in the tobacco warehousse of the dock that night – that night they found the fellow in the kiln. My ssoldierz ssmelled it alsso . . .’
‘Who? Who is it in the audience that smells so,’ said Noah. ‘Did you detect him from the pit?’
‘I think I might know who,’ said Mr Williamson, his eyes fixed on a short man towards the back of the benches.
Noah’s eyes followed the line of the gaze and saw the man. Despite the press of humanity, there was a distinct space either side of the fellow in question, who appeared even from that distance to be a grubby specimen. His hair was thick with grime and his clothing dark with accumulated dirt. More significantly, he seemed to be showing no interest in the blood-and-fur phrenzy of the pit, but rather stared with blank manikin eyes at the three now studying him. If he was surprised or afraid to be identified, he showed not a sign of it.
‘George – I wonder if you would like to situate yourself by the doorway while I approach that little man,’ said Noah, beginning to make his way around the inner rim of the benches without taking his eyes from his target.
Mr Williamson did immediately as bidden, picking a way through the flailing arms and jostling figures all about him.
The doughty Claymore had by this point dispatched almost forty of the sewer rats, whose bodies lay twitching or inert about the blood-spattered circle. It was the height of the evening’s entertainment and there was much money to be made or lost upon the next thirty seconds.
Only now did the stinking man on the benches appear to perceive he was to be trapped, and, like a rat himself, looked rapidly about for a means of escape. The door to the stairway was distant, and Mr Williamson was struggling through bodies to reach it. Meanwhile, Noah came ever closer with an unwavering stare of intent.
Neither of his pursuers could have anticipated what next occurred.
With an agility betrayed by his stature, the stinking fellow vaulted over the rear of the benches and dropped some eight feet into the perimeter space by the wall. An uncurtained window there had been whitewashed over and this he shattered with a determined kick that was barely heard above the clamour of Claymore’s final seconds in the pit.
Pausing only to clear any remaining shards from the frame’s lower edge with his boot, the man then crawled out backwards to hang with both hands from the sill above the alley beside the public house. By the time Noah arrived at the window, his quarry had already dropped from the first floor to land with a jolting grunt in the mud below.
Noah risked his head over the parapet and saw the little fellow exchanging words with a colossal man whose face seemed to swirl with strange blue-black shadows: the distinctive c
urlicued tattooing of those odd Antipodean warriors occasionally encountered about the world’s shipping districts. At the sight of Noah, this giant raised a pistol and let off a shot that smashed the remaining pane even as his target jerked back inside.
‘Are you wounded?’ asked a rapidly approaching Mr Williamson.
Noah removed glass shards from his shoulders. ‘I am unharmed. He went through the window here and his accomplice fired at me.’
‘Who? The Italian?’
‘No – a South Sea islander. An enormous fellow.’
‘A harpooner, perhaps?’
‘Very likely. I saw his face and would know him again.’
‘We must go and apprehend them. Quickly!’
‘George – wait! It is futile; they will be already gone by the time we descend to the street. Even if they are not, the islander is armed and physically more than a match for both of us. Let us instead be content to act on the knowledge we have.’
‘What knowledge? The man has escaped.’
‘If nothing else, we know we are looking for a small malodorous man and a huge one with a tattooed face. Let us also add the Italian and we have three quite distinctive characters to seek – all the better if they are associates. When we meet with Ben and Mr Cullen, I rather suspect we will be in possession of the requisite materials to finally solve this mystery.’
‘Hmm.’
‘I am glad you agree. Now – did Claymore kill his fifty rats? I had five pounds on him to succeed . . .’
TWENTY-THREE
Mr Cullen’s first sensation on regaining consciousness was the pain in the back of his head. An exploratory hand proved what he already knew: he had been clubbed senseless, the assault leaving a raw gash upon the back of his scull. He was now lying face down on a cold stone floor.
Though the very act of thinking seemed to hurt, he tried to reconstruct how he might have been attacked and by whom. He clearly recalled a man coming to him at the gates of the London Dock and telling him that Mr Rigby needed an extra hand to unload some cargo. Then he and the messenger had re-entered the dock and boarded a ship, the Concordia, which had travelled a matter of twenty minutes or so east to Frying Pan wharf.
The Thieves' Labyrinth (Albert Newsome 3) Page 25