Blackstone and the Great Game (The Blackstone Detective Series Book 2)

by Spencer, Sally

  Blackstone shifted his gaze from Patterson to the blind clog dancer, otherwise known as Detective Constable Dove. The constable wasn’t doing a bad job at all, he thought. Dove was clumsy—but not too clumsy. And he had certainly assumed the air of a man who knew that a few coins, thrown in pity, were all that stood between him and starvation.

  He moved the glasses again, and briefly studied the coster-monger who appeared to be taking a rest from the heavy work of pushing his barrow up and down the streets. Very convincing, as was the flower girl, despite her distinctly masculine build.

  Everything—and everyone—was in place. The trap was set, and now all that remained was to wait for the prey to fall into it.

  Two

  The first kidnapping had occurred several weeks earlier, in mid-June. The victim was Vanessa Elizabeth Todd, the eleven-year-old daughter of a prosperous merchant banker and the eldest of his six children. She’d disappeared on a family expedition to London Zoo.

  ‘Vanessa went off to buy a bag of buns so that the other children could feed them to the animals,’ the tearful governess who’d been in charge of the expedition had explained. ‘She’s normally a very responsible girl. But she…she just didn’t come back.’

  ‘You searched the zoo thoroughly?’ Blackstone asked. ‘No, I I….not personally. I stayed with the other children.’

  ‘But the coachman, Thomas, and James, who’s the second footman, were both with us, and they…and they…’

  ‘They searched?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Which was a bit like closing the stable door after the giraffes had bolted, Blackstone had thought.

  But he hadn’t said it out loud. Either the woman was the best actress since Lily Langtry—in which case it would have been a pointless statement to make—or, more likely, she was telling the truth—so reminding her of her failure would have been unnecessarily cruel.

  The servants, too, seemed so open and honest that Blackstone would have ruled them out of his inquiry even if he hadn’t received the report on the mysterious woman—heavily veiled—who’d been seen leaving the zoo with a girl who matched Vanessa Todd’s description.

  The girl had seemed to show some reluctance to leave, but the woman had been most insistent. It couldn’t have sounded more like a kidnapping if there’d been a town crier walking ahead of them to proclaim the abduction.

  A ransom note arrived, just as Blackstone had expected it would. In what was a barely legible scrawl, it told Mr Todd that if he ever wanted to see his darling daughter again, he would place one hundred pounds in an attaché case and take it to Victoria Station.

  ‘We think that you should pay it,’ Blackstone had told the girl’s concerned father. ‘A hundred pounds is by no means a small amount of money, but I imagine you can easily afford to raise it. And once the kidnappers have their ransom, they’ll release your daughter.’

  ‘But what if they don’t do that? Might they not…’ the merchant banker gulped as he struggled to maintain his stiff-upper-lip, ‘…might they not just kill her?’

  ‘Why should they? They’ll have the money. You will have fulfilled your part of the contract. What possible reason could they have to run the risk of being hanged?’

  ‘They may ask for a further ransom,’ the merchant banker had pointed out.

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘But how can you know that?’

  ‘This is a very amateur gang,’ Blackstone had assured him.

  ‘They demanded a hundred pounds, which—it is true—is probably a fortune to them. But if they’d truly known their business, they’d have studied your background and asked for much more. And being amateur, they’ll also be nervous, which means they’ll release your daughter as soon as they possibly can. You’ll get her back—as well as most of your money. And I’ll get my criminals.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because they are so amateur. Once they have the hard cash in their hands, they won’t be able to resist spending it. And in the world they move in, a man with a guinea in his pocket is headline news. It won’t be long before one of my informers leads me to the gang.’

  ‘You make it sound so easy.’

  ‘It is so easy,’ Blackstone had replied—almost regretfully, for he enjoyed the art of detecting. ‘Trust me, and I’ll return your daughter to you.’

  The merchant banker handed the ransom over to a nondescript little man on Victoria Station. The detectives posted to follow the kidnapper soon lost him in the crowd, just as Blackstone had known they would. The girl was found—dazed but unharmed—by a uniformed constable on Mile End Road, less than an hour later.

  Then Blackstone sat back and waited. Sooner or later, he’d told himself, he would receive the information that a normally down-at-heel criminal was splashing around money at the dogs or at the Whitechapel Wonderland. All he had to do was be patient.

  He was patient—but he waited in vain for the lead he was expecting.

  Three

  Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be happening on Westminster Bridge, though sufficient time had passed for the chiming in Blackstone’s ears to have disappeared almost completely.

  Patterson still stood there clutching his attaché case to him as if it contained something of value, the clog dancer continued to dance, and the flower girl with the broad shoulders glared discouragingly at anyone who looked as if he might be intending to buy a bunch of violets or a single red rose.

  Blackstone checked his watch. Five minutes past two. Were the kidnappers merely late, or were they not planning to turn up at all?

  On the bridge, Sergeant Patterson found himself thinking, none too warmly, about Obadiah Ramsbottom.

  ‘A thousand pound?’ the northern manufacturer had exclaimed, when he had received a ransom note written in the same hand as the one which had been sent to Mr Todd. ‘A thousand pound! That’s outrageous! I could build meself a whole new mill for a thousand pound!’

  ‘We’re concerned with your son’s safety here,’ Sam Blackstone had reminded him quietly.

  ‘That’s as mebee. But we know value of our brass up north, an’ a thousand pound is still a lot of money. Besides, I pay me taxes—an’ a damn sight too many of them in my opinion. I expect the police to protect me from scoundrels like these. It’s time you started earnin’ them fancy wages of yours, Inspector.’

  Blackstone, who pledged half his wage to Doctor Barnardo’s orphanages and could barely get by on what was left, permitted himself a thin smile. ‘My sergeant will take your place on the bridge, if you wish. Now, if you could just see your way clear to advancing us the ransom money—’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing,’ Ramsbottom had replied firmly. ‘Use torn-up newspaper to pad out your bag with.’

  And, since there seemed to be no point in pushing the matter any further, that was exactly what they had done.

  ‘A mean soulless man, that Obadiah Ramsbottom,’ Blackstone had said when the manufacturer had left them.

  ‘A mean, soulless man indeed,’ Patterson thought, as he stood on the bridge waiting for the kidnappers to show their hand.

  ***

  From his vantage point in the bell tower, Blackstone watched as the hansom cab travelling towards the Embankment suddenly swerved across the road, on collision course with the side of the other hansom going in the opposite direction.

  The driver of the rogue cab lashed at his horse and reined in frantically, but it was too late. Though the horse did not smash into the other vehicle, the cab it was pulling most certainly did.

  Blackstone sighed. ‘That’s just what we needed,’ he said aloud, though there was no one in the tower to hear him.

  The second cab rocked unsteadily, then toppled over. The driver went sprawling. His horse, still between the shafts, reared hysterically. More horses panicked, and several of them followed the example of the hansom hack and reared. A coal wagon spilled its load. Another wagon, piled high with empty fish boxes, swayed dangerously from side to side.

 
‘What a bloody fiasco!’ Blackstone groaned.

  When Patterson saw the whiskered gentleman attempting to clamber out of the capsized hansom, his first instinct was to rush forward and assist him. Then he reminded himself that whatever else was happening on the bridge, he had a more important job to do.

  The driver of the hansom seemed to share none of Patterson’s concern for his passenger. Having once clambered to his feet and dusted himself down, he made a beeline for the cab which had been the cause of his misfortune.

  The two cabbies—one still mounted behind his hansom, the other standing in the road—squared their shoulders in anticipation of the conflict they both knew would come.

  ‘You’ve got no right to be put in charge of an ‘orse, Ben Brightwell!’ said the one standing on the bridge. ‘No right at all.’

  ‘Weren’t my fault,’ said the other. ‘The ‘orse went a bit off course, but you could ‘ave avoided it, Jonty Andrews, if yer’d had anyfink at all about yer.’

  The man who had thus been established in the mind of the growing crowd as ‘Jonty’ made a rush at his rival’s hansom. The rival—Ben—reached for his whip, but left it a second too long—for while his fingers were still groping for the handle, Jonty had taken a firm grip of his left leg and was in the process of pulling him to the ground.

  Once again, Patterson had to restrain his urge to intervene.

  ***

  One of the cabbies caught the other a heavy blow on the chin. The man’s head rocked, but a second later he had launched a worthy counter-attack at his opponent’s ample guts. A circle of onlookers quickly gathered around them, and even from a distance, Blackstone could tell that they were cheering and some of them had started making bets.

  The Inspector scanned the area beyond the fight. And as he had already begun to suspect—not to say feared—he saw that a second drama was in progress.

  A woman was at the centre of this new disturbance. Literally at the centre! She stood alone, gazing into the faces of the crowd which formed a semicircle around her. Then she pointed. It was clear what she was saying. Her pocket had been picked, and she had spotted the guilty man. The man in question raised his hands as if to call on heaven to proclaim his innocence, but several other people, ignoring his appeal to the deity, had already started to manhandle him.

  Very convenient, Blackstone thought grimly. Too bloody convenient!

  He swept the scene with his field glasses, like a hawk searching out prey. Despite all the temptations to break rank, his men still held their positions, and he was proud of them for that. But at the same moment he was starting to gain a better appreciation of the planning which had gone into the kidnappers’ operation—and he had no doubt that there would be at least one more challenge to test the resolve of his detectives.

  The test came an instant later. The explosions were so loud that the sound of them carried even to the bell tower, bringing with them memories of rifle fire in the hills of Afghanistan. But it was not rifles which were being shot now. Such an extreme was unnecessary. Simple firecrackers—easier to conceal, much simpler to deploy—were doing an excellent job of wreaking all the havoc that the kidnappers could ever have desired.

  On the bridge women screamed and old soldiers instinctively flung themselves to the ground. The horses, already in a state of nervousness, reacted to this fresh horror with total panic.

  ‘Hold your positions,’ Blackstone urged his men, though he knew they had no chance of hearing him. ‘Hold your bloody positions!’

  The blind clog dancer broke cover first, grabbing the reins of a rearing horse which threatened to trample a small child. The costermonger and florist followed, stepping in to restore order just as they had been trained to. Which left Patterson alone—unwatched and unguarded.

  Blackstone pounded his forehead with his fist. He wished there was something he could do to assist his sergeant—but even if God suddenly granted him wings, he would still arrive on the scene too late to do anything.

  The two men were easy enough for him to spot. Both wore cloth caps and mufflers which effectively hid most of their faces, both moved in with the lithe assurance of professional thugs.

  The thugs had known there’d have to be two of them on this particular job, Blackstone thought bitterly. They’d considered every eventuality—including the fact that the man carrying the ransom might be wearing a top hat.

  The Inspector watched helplessly as the men took up their positions—ground his teeth in frustration as one of them lifted Patterson’s hat clear of his head and the other struck the sergeant’s now-exposed skull with a blackjack.

  Patterson swayed, a look of total incomprehension filling his face. The thug who had removed his hat quickly discarded it and made a grab for the attaché case. The sergeant offered no resistance. He was out for the count, and by the time his legs obeyed the message from his brain and crumpled beneath him, the two thugs were already making their way towards the southern end of the bridge.

  Four

  Blackstone gazed pensively from his office window down on to the busy Thames below. Less than a decade earlier, the Metropolitan Police had worked from a cramped building which had taken its name from its location—Scotland Yard, a mean square so close to Charing Cross Station that the air around it was thick with cinder dust. And look what they had now, he thought. New Scotland Yard stood proudly on the banks of the Thames, its lower floors built of finest Portland stone, its corner turrets proclaiming to the world that here was an organization to be taken seriously. Thirty-one superintendents were based in this new Yard, as well as 598 inspectors, 1831 sergeants and 12,738 constables. It was the epitome of modern policing, and it should have struck fear into the heart of each and every criminal. The only problem, he concluded, was that as the Force got bigger, the crooks seemed to be getting smarter.

  ‘It was a nice touch, that,’ he said grudgingly, as he turned away from the window. ‘A very nice touch indeed.’

  Patterson, who was sitting in a chair facing Blackstone’s desk, rubbed the back of his head. It had only recently ceased to ache—and now was starting to itch. ‘What was a nice touch?’ he asked.

  ‘That bit of play-acting the two cab drivers put on for you. ‘Look where you’re goin’, Ben!’ ‘It was all your fault, Jonty!’ Once they’d started addressing each other by name, who’d ever have imagined they weren’t exactly what they seemed to be?’

  Patterson groaned. ‘Certainly not me,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘There’s no possibility they really were cab drivers, is there?’ he added hopefully.

  ‘Not a snowball’s chance in hell,’ Blackstone assured him. ‘While you’ve been sitting back like an injured puppy, letting the doctor fuss and minister over you, I’ve been working. To be more specific, I’ve been reading reports from the two cabbies who had their hansoms stolen from them not half an hour before the fracas on Westminster Bridge.’

  ‘The same two cabs?’

  ‘No doubt about it. Their licence numbers were a perfect match with the ones involved in the so-called collision.’

  ‘So who else do you think was in on it?’ Patterson asked. ‘The woman who claimed that she’d been robbed?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s only the start. There were the two who attacked you, and at least another two whose job it was to throw firecrackers under the horses’ hooves. How many are we up to so far?’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘Plus a couple more men held in reserve.’

  ‘Held in reserve for what?’

  ‘To create even more diversions, should it have proved to be necessary—which it didn’t!’

  Patterson rubbed the back of his head again. ‘Don’t blame the rest of the boys. They had no idea anything like that was going to happen. I was in charge, and if anybody’s responsible, it’s me.’

  Blackstone shook his head. ‘Don’t blame yourself, either,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t have known what was coming. You were like a lamb led to the slaughter.’

  ***


  The pocket watch which Obadiah Ramsbottom had checked three times in the last five minutes was the only thing that his father—poor bugger—had had to leave him in his will. It was a battered timepiece, which hadn’t looked like much even when it was new, but it was accurate enough and there was no point in spending good money on replacing it.

  ‘A quarter to three!’ Ramsbottom fumed. ‘We should have heard from that Inspector Blackstone by now. By hell, I thought the police in Preston were a bloody useless lot, but the ones I’ve seen down here make all our local bobbies seem like George Stephenson.’

  ‘You should have paid the ransom, Obadiah,’ his down-trodden wife sniffed tearfully. ‘I always said you should have paid the ransom.’

  ‘Nay, lass, that would have made no sense at all,’ Ramsbottom replied. ‘These criminals are just like mill workers—give ‘em an inch, and they’ll want a bloody mile.’

  ‘At least if you’d paid the money we’d have had our Wilfred back by now,’ Jessica Ramsbottom sobbed.

  ‘We’ll get our Wilfred back soon enough,’ her husband assured her, with all the conviction of a man who had never been contradicted since the day his bank balance had grown to ten thousand pounds. ‘Aye, we’ll get ‘im back an’ it won’t cost us no thousand quid, neither. Not if that Blackstone feller plays his cards proper.’

  ‘I’m…I’m not so sure about that.’

  ‘Well, I am. I know the common man better than he knows himself. An’ the one thing he respects above all else is bein’ showed a firm hand.’

  But suppose these criminals aren’t ‘common men’.’

  ‘What else would they be? Do you think it’s likely Lord Salisbury took the day off from the House of Lords to kidnap our lad?’

  Accepting that further argument was pointless, Jessica Ramsbottom hung her head. She wished they’d never come to London; wished they’d never booked in at this posh hotel from which—somewhere between the family suite and the dining room—her son had been snatched.