Phantom of Blood Alley

by Paul Stewart

  I swallowed nervously. Cheese-Chaser Hill was the steepest incline in the park. It was where, every July, a cheese-chasing competition would take place. At the blast of the alderman’s whistle, a round truckle of cheese would be rolled down the hill and dozens of the city’s most reckless young men would chase after it, running and tumbling down the hill in an attempt to get to the bottom first – and there were always several who ended up in St Jude’s Hospital with broken bones.

  Still, pleased with my success so far, I decided to give it a go. I patted Kaiser and began the long tramp up the steep slope, the wheelboard clamped under one arm. I was about halfway up when an involuntary shudder gripped my body, as though someone had walked over my grave.

  I looked round nervously, but I was quite alone.

  I continued climbing, but the feelings of unease persisted. The hairs at the nape of my neck were standing on end, and despite my new lined waistcoat I felt shivery and gooseflesh-cold.

  Behind me, I heard Kaiser barking. I turned and peered down the hill. He was straining at the leash, desperate to break free, his anguished yelps and howls echoing round the park. Will and Molly were beside him, trying their best to calm him down, but the dog was inconsolable.

  Whatever had spooked me was clearly unsettling Kaiser as well.

  Reaching the top of the hill, I turned and placed the wheelboard at my feet and prepared myself for the descent. In the distance, Kaiser was struggling more frantically than ever to break free, up on his back legs and barking furiously.

  ‘It’s all right, lad,’ I said softly. ‘I’m coming.’

  With that, I leaped onto the wheelboard and propelled myself down the hill. I kept my legs flexed, my knees bent and my arms outstretched, just as Will had instructed. And as I gathered speed, I felt the wind tugging at my jacket and blowing through my hair. Apart from highstacking, it was the most exhilarating thing I’d ever done.

  Ahead of me, Will and Molly were shouting encouragement and waving at me, their arms raised high above their heads. As for Kaiser, the poor creature looked petrified. His fur was bristling, his eyes rolled, and from behind his bared teeth there came a sustained, high-pitched snarl.

  The next moment, there was a splintering crack, and the wheelboard flipped forward on itself, catapulting yours truly high up into the air. I somersaulted over and landed heavily on my back, where I lay, badly winded.

  With that, I leaped onto the wheelboard and propelled myself down the hill.

  I opened my eyes to see Will and Molly staring down at me, a mixture of concern and glee on their faces.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Will.

  I pulled myself up on my elbows. ‘Nothing broken,’ I said.

  ‘You must have hit a bump or something,’ said Will. He handed me Kaiser’s leash and checked his wheelboard for damage. Finding none but a single bent spoke, he looked up. ‘Come on, Barnaby,’ he said, ‘I’ll treat us all to roasted chestnuts.’

  The four of us crossed the path to the glowing brazier next to the bandstand, where a grizzled old man was selling chestnuts in brown paper cones. As we approached, the heat from the coals blasted in our faces. The old man looked up, the fiery glow gleaming on his silvery stubble and peg-like teeth.

  ‘Three bags, sir,’ said Will, handing over three copper coins.

  Kaiser had calmed down, his fur lying flat at his shoulders and his tongue lolling as he sniffed at the chestnuts. We sat down on our jackets and set to work on the chestnuts, and the air filled with their rich, earthy smell as we peeled off the blackened skins. As my mouth filled with the sweet, pulpy flesh inside and I fed Kaiser a peeled chestnut in turn, the sunny park and its cheerful inhabitants banished all thoughts of spirits and phantoms from my head. It was a perfect Sunday in the park.

  That night, with Kaiser curled up on his blanket, I plunged into a deep and dreamless sleep the moment my head hit the pillow, waking the following morning at seven o’clock with the light streaming in at my attic window.

  Kaiser was already awake, gnawing softly at the mutton bone I’d given him the night before. When he saw that I was also awake, he climbed to his feet and trotted over to me. I cupped his great head in my hands and tickled him round the ears.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s the kennel for you this morning,’ I told him. ‘I have to go to Whitegate Prison to pay Clarissa Oliphant a visit.’

  The fine weather of the weekend had broken and, as I made my way across the rooftops that Monday morning, a light drizzle began to fall. I arrived at the prison gates shortly before ten o’clock. Visiting hours were between ten and twelve, and I joined the end of a desultory line of friends and relatives of the inmates awaiting trial and locked up inside. Convicted prisoners, following Jeremy Hobholt’s rules, were allowed no visitors at all.

  At ten on the dot, a low door set into one of the huge, white gates swung open, and a bulky prison warder appeared from the shadowy interior, an open book clutched in red, beefy fingers. The line began to shuffle forward, with the warder ticking off names on the page.

  ‘Inmate to be visited?’ he asked gruffly, without looking up, when I reached the front of the line.

  ‘Clarissa Oliphant,’ I told him.

  He made a note in his book. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Barnaby Grimes. Tick-tock lad.’ Another note followed before I was allowed to enter.

  A tall, heavily built warder with a jagged scar through one eyebrow led me silently into a small hall. It had a high vaulted ceiling, and a stone floor where a dozen square tables had been laid out in two rows. Most were already occupied, and the air buzzed with the low, intimate conversation forbidden in the rest of the prison. I was ushered to an empty table near the side of the hall and told to wait.

  I shivered. The whitewashed walls and cold stone floor combined with the vigilant prison warders to create an atmosphere of extreme oppressiveness. When the warder returned, he was accompanied by the stooped, shuffling figure of Clarissa Oliphant.

  I smiled up at her, trying to disguise my shock at her appearance. Her face looked taut and drawn, her cheeks hollow and eyes ringed with dark circles. There were oily stains down the front of her dress, and I knew how the usually impeccably turned out woman must have hated my seeing her looking so dishevelled. The warder indicated the chair opposite me, and as Clarissa moved forward to sit down, there was a clanking of chains, and I realized her ankles were in manacles.

  ‘Oh, this is awful, quite awful, Mr Grimes,’ she said, her voice close to tears, the moment the warder withdrew. ‘I had no idea how punishing these so-called “model” prisons actually are.’

  She looked round sheepishly at the warder, aware that raising her voice above a whisper would terminate our visit instantly.

  ‘Thank you, Barnaby, for visiting me in this dreadful place. Needless to say, with the police convinced of my guilt, I’m in desperate need of your help.’ She looked at me beseechingly. ‘It goes without saying, I shall reward you handsomely for your efforts …’

  I didn’t have the heart to tell the old governess that, since the robbery at her house, she was virtually penniless.

  ‘I’ll do whatever I can,’ I reassured her, taking my notebook from the second pocket of my new poacher’s waistcoat. ‘Now, did Laurence have any enemies? Anyone who might have wanted to see him dead?’

  ‘I’ve thought of little else since my incarceration,’ said Clarissa, struggling to keep her voice down, ‘and there are four names that I keep coming back to. Although, due to Laurence’s secretive nature, I know precious little about them …’

  ‘And they are?’ I urged, pencil poised above my notebook.

  ‘First is Sir Crispin Blears,’ said Clarissa. ‘The noted society portrait painter. I know Laurence approached him for funds, but then, for reasons I can only guess at, accused him of attempting to destroy his life.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Laurence was so highly strung, Barnaby, and his work only seemed to intensify his feelings of resent
ment … Then, of course, there was a chemist he seemed to blame for his unfortunate accident. Laurence actually claimed that this fellow had caused it on purpose, and was trying to kill him for some reason. A.G. Hoskins Industrial Chemists – I found a docket in Laurence’s fustian weave overcoat once …’

  Clarissa’s eyes brimmed with tears.

  ‘And the third name,’ I pressed, aware that the warder was looking in our direction.

  ‘Yes, yes, the third name,’ said Clarissa, gathering herself together with considerable difficulty. ‘That unfortunately is Miles Morgenstern, my brother’s former assistant. Laurence was ill, Barnaby,’ she pleaded, her voice raised. ‘And his accursed work was causing it …’

  The warder was rapidly approaching our table as Clarissa continued, her voice now booming.

  ‘And the fourth is his tutor, Dean Henry Dodson!’ Clarissa exclaimed tearfully. ‘He started poor Laurence on this road to ruin! Go and see him, Barnaby,’ she begged me as the warder took her by the arm and forcibly dragged her away, ‘and demand that he explain himself!’

  The mansions of Monrovia Walk and Batavia Park, with their ivy-clad loggias, glass-roofed ateliers and ornate studios, were as distinctive and decorative as the grand society painters and sculptors who lived and worked in them. Classical villas and Mesopotamian follies nestled beside Byzantine palaces and miniature Bavarian castles, as each artist attempted to outdo his neighbours with his superior taste and artistic vision.

  A brass plaque bolted to the wall of number 16 Batavia Park, a mosaic-encrusted mansion built in the Moorish style, confirmed that I’d reached the grand residence of the first name on the list I’d made of Clarissa Oliphant’s prime suspects.

  Sir Crispin St John Blears, FRSA

  I pulled the bell rope. No sooner had the bell begun to jangle than the carved sandalwood door opened, and I was confronted by a richly clad figure.

  ‘Well, you’re certainly not Lady Lavinia,’ proclaimed a bored, foppish voice with a hint of disdain.

  Sir Crispin Blears was a tall, aristocratic-looking man with a long face and an aquiline nose beneath a black mane of studiously ruffled hair, which had a single, distinctive white streak at its centre. Dressed in the long, flowing robes of an eastern potentate, anywhere else, Sir Crispin would have cut an absurdly comic figure. Yet here, in the doorway of this eccentric mansion, he seemed perfectly in keeping.

  ‘Excuse the intrusion, sir,’ I said. ‘My name’s Grimes, Barnaby Grimes, and I’ve been commissioned, in a private capacity, to look into the affairs of the late Laurence Oliphant …’

  ‘A swag-hound, eh?’ snorted Sir Crispin.

  It was a term used to describe private investigators who looked into unsolved crimes in the hope of reward money, or ‘swag’. They were a disreputable bunch, little more than petty swindlers and blackmailers themselves, often implicated in the very crimes they claimed to be investigating.

  ‘No, I assure you,’ I protested, ‘I’m a tick-tock lad by profession, and I’m looking into this as a favour to a client of mine.’

  ‘The late Laurence Oliphant, you say?’ said Sir Crispin, his eyes narrowing. ‘A gifted fellow if, ultimately, a misguided one. Fortunately for you, Mr Grimes, my client is delayed,’ he said, pulling a gold fob-watch from beneath his silken robes. ‘You’ve got five minutes. Follow me.’

  He took me up a sweeping staircase, the tiled walls lined with gold-framed portraits of various sizes. At the first-floor landing, he strode through an arched doorway and into a high-ceilinged studio.

  It was cluttered with the tools of his trade – exotic rugs, animal skins and tapestries in one corner provided the backdrops to his portraits, while the tables and cabinets around the walls groaned beneath a bewildering array of props. There were tooled breastplates, plumed helmets, muskets, swords and shields for those of his clients who saw themselves as men of action or warriors from a bygone age; musical instruments, astronomical tools and ancient vases and urns for the artistic. There was even a stuffed polar bear and a lion skin for intrepid explorers to pose beside. In the centre of the studio, beneath a north-facing skylight, was a raised dais, upon which a gilded throne had been placed, with several tiger skins draped over its gilded arms. And opposite it, on an immense easel, was a large canvas with an unfinished portrait of a breathtakingly beautiful woman.

  ‘How can I help you, Mr Grimes?’ said Sir Crispin distractedly, gazing at the portrait. ‘I haven’t seen poor Laurence for months,’ he went on. ‘Not since our little falling out …’

  ‘Falling out?’ I said.

  He picked up a brush from the table beside the easel and dabbed at the painting.

  ‘Eighteen months ago, Laurence Oliphant came to me with an invention that he claimed would revolutionize portraiture – a process of photogravure, or “painting with light,” as I have heard it called, that he’d named oliphantography. I admit I was intrigued. I knew how the old masters had used mirrors and lenses to create projections on their canvases, and thought this new process might prove helpful. I became his backer, financing his experiments to the tune of ten guineas a month.’

  He picked up a brush from the table beside the easel and dabbed at the painting.

  I nodded, impressed. It was a sizable sum.

  ‘Of course, I knew that there was no real artistic merit in Laurence’s work. The man was little more than a chemist, but he didn’t seem to see it that way …’ Sir Crispin’s voice trailed away as he scrutinized his painting. ‘Dear Laurence began to get ideas above his station. Started claiming that his “oliphantypes” were a new art form and would make painting obsolete! It was the talk of a madman.’

  Sir Crispin turned to me, his eyes blazing.

  ‘I have dedicated myself to my art. I studied at the best conservatoires in Europe. I learned from the great Reynaldo Bottacini to produce my own palette of colours, using cinnabar and cochineal for red, cadmium for yellow, arsenic for emerald green. Many was the long night I spent grinding lapis lazuli and azurite gems with a mortar and pestle to produce ultramarine of such vibrancy … Then this … this … pharmacist,’ he said, spitting out the word, ‘with his glass plates and chemicals, tells me that he will replace the unique perspective of an artist’s eye with a mechanical lens …’

  He shook his head, and put the back of his clenched fist dramatically to his brow.

  ‘I wanted nothing more to do with him,’ he said. ‘I stopped his monthly stipend two months ago in order to put an end to his outlandish boasts once and for all.’ He turned back to the painting and dabbed at it angrily with his brush. ‘Laurence didn’t take it too well. Stormed out, muttering that I’d be sorry.’

  I remembered the oliphantype of Clarissa Oliphant. It might have been produced with chemicals, but it had managed to capture something of the essence of the person; some internal truth. I suspected Crispin Blears, when he’d seen Laurence’s work, had noticed it too.

  ‘And that was the last time you saw him?’ I said.

  Sir Crispin turned. ‘Well, yes, I suppose so …’ he said uncertainly. ‘Although there was the incident at the summer show at the Academy.’ He paused, then laughed uneasily. ‘Perhaps you read about it, Mr Grimes. I was showing my portrait of Lady Sarah Poultney as Diana, goddess of the hunt, to quite considerable acclaim, when …’

  ‘Yes?’ I said, intrigued.

  ‘The painting was damaged,’ he said, his face colouring. ‘Nobody saw it happen, although the gallery was well attended and the paintings watched at all times. But I suspected Laurence Oliphant was behind it.’

  ‘Damaged?’ I said. ‘How?’

  ‘The canvas was slashed, Mr Grimes,’ he said hotly. ‘With the point of a fencing sword by the look of it.’

  Just then, I heard the doorbell jangle in the hallway below, followed by the low mumble of voices.

  ‘That will be Lady Lavinia,’ said Sir Crispin, composing his face and returning the paintbrush to a jar on the table. ‘I’m in my studio, Carruthers,’ he
called out, then turned to me. ‘I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you,’ he said. ‘But perhaps you can tell me something, Mr Grimes. How exactly did poor Laurence die?’

  I returned Sir Crispin’s gaze levelly. ‘He was murdered,’ I told him, ‘run through by a fencing sword.’

  A.G. Hoskins Industrial Chemists was situated on Coldbath Road, a grubby back street not far from the wharves of Riverhythe, and a short walk from Laurence Oliphant’s lock-up in Blood Alley. As I stepped through a low door situated next to a much larger set of double doors, a spring-loaded bell clanged above my head, announcing my arrival.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’ said a thin, stooped-looking man with greasy hair and a grubby apron. Perched on top of his head was a tall stovepipe hat, to which were pinned scraps of crumpled paper – chits, dockets and formulae of various kinds by the look of them.

  ‘Mr Albert Hoskins?’ I asked, and received a nod in reply.

  His brown eyes had a look of disappointment about them, an impression made stronger by his moustache, which drooped at the ends. It was as though fate had dealt him a bad hand, and he knew it.

  ‘I’m enquiring into the affairs of the late Laurence Oliphant …’ I began, only for the chemist to stagger back from the low counter that separated us, like a head-butted bruiser in a bar-room brawl.

  Albert Hoskins sank back onto a sack of desiccated phosphate granules, his head in his hands. Around us in the dismal light of the large warehouse were crates, sacks and huge jars of chemicals in powdered and liquid form, carefully stored and labelled on row upon row of wooden shelves.

  ‘Mr Oliphant … dead?’ groaned the chemist. ‘Well, I’ll be blamed, no doubt about it. Old Albert’s collar will be fingered, regardless of the facts of the case …’

  He gripped the brim of his stovepipe hat with both hands and pulled it down hard on his head, as if trying to take refuge inside it.

  ‘So the explosion killed Mr Oliphant in the end, did it?’ Albert peered up at me from beneath the brim of the hat with those disappointed eyes of his.