by M. J. Trow
‘Yes, but it’s the method.’ Dyer blew smoke rings to the ceiling. ‘Wire around the throat. Garrotting.’
‘Thuggee,’ a voice croaked from across the table. Gabriel Horner would go to the opening of an envelope, and a chance of supper at Willis’s was far too good an opportunity to pass up. Especially with port of this vintage. Next to snipes’ kidneys at the Cock in Fleet Street, this was seventh heaven.
‘Come again?’ Dyer frowned. It wasn’t always possible to follow the old man’s train of thought.
‘The Thuggee—’ Horner leaned back, happy, as always, to be the centre of attention – ‘were a Hindu sect of killers. Our brave boys came upon them in central India. What was that now …? Oh, must be thirty years ago.’
‘Before we were born,’ Dyer reminded him.
‘Yes,’ Horner said, sighing. ‘Obviously. Anyway, they preyed on travellers – won their friendship, rode with them on their caravans through the mountain passes. Then they’d strike, the Phansigars, the noose-operators. Of course, they didn’t use wire; they used a yellow band of cloth – rather like the American’s red tie, I fancy.’
All four of them looked at Grand, still talking with Sala at the top table. The prize-winning journalist had prevailed upon the ex-captain to sport his red tie on this special occasion, even if he technically no longer had a right to wear it.
‘But wasn’t there a bit of a rage for it, Gabriel?’ Batchelor asked. ‘A few years ago. Here in London, I mean?’
‘Oh, yes. But you must remember that, all three of you. You were already in the business by then.’
‘I was tea boy on the Graphic,’ Dyer said. ‘They didn’t let me anywhere near a story.’
‘Don’t look at me, Gabriel.’ Buckley raised his hands. ‘I was destined for a career in the church, remember. Didn’t have my famous screaming row with my mother until late ’sixty-three.’
‘Jim?’ Horner couldn’t believe how quickly people forgot. Ah, the journalists of today!
‘Flower shows,’ Batchelor said. ‘And I know more about Mr Bazalgette’s Embankment improvement scheme, I’ll wager, than Mr Bazalgette. Crime? That, I was told, was for real reporters.’
‘Quite right.’ Horner nodded, pouring himself an outsize port. ‘Well, take it from this real reporter, it was nasty while it lasted. Oh, flash in the pan stuff, really, but it woke the boys in blue up a little, so it served its purpose. Two men would work it. A tall one would strike from behind, loop a rope, or scarf or something similar around a victim’s neck. The second one, his partner in crime, so to speak, would then rifle said victim’s pockets while said victim’s hands were at his throat trying to remove the noose. No real harm done, as it happened – a few rope burns and, of course, the loss of one’s wallet, but nothing like this.’
Batchelor nodded. ‘No, this is different.’
‘Not that different, though,’ Horner persisted. ‘Dark alleyways, attack from behind.’
‘But nothing stolen, Gabriel,’ Dyer said, chipping in. ‘Ladies of the Night. That adds a new dimension, don’t you think?’
‘I do.’ Horner nodded. ‘Who’s on the case?’
‘I am,’ Dyer and Buckley chorused.
Batchelor had to bite his tongue.
‘You know they caught John Wilkes Booth?’ George Sala turned to Matthew Grand on the top table.
Grand nodded. ‘I heard. Though I’ll wager your telegraphic services have told you more than I know.’
‘The Sixteenth New York Cavalry found him in a tobacco barn at the Garrett farm near Bowling Green. There was a fire. Somebody shot Booth in the neck. He died soon after.’
‘When was this?’ Grand asked.
‘The twenty-fifth, as I understand it.’
‘Eleven days after he killed Lincoln,’ Grand said, thinking aloud.
‘That’s Lafayette Baker for you.’ Sala refilled the ex-Captain’s glass. ‘Say what you like about him, the man gets results.’
‘Who?’ Grand looked suitably blank.
‘Lafayette C. Baker, head of the National Detective Police. I met him once in Washington. I understand he was in command of the Sixteenth. I’m surprised you didn’t come across him, what with you being at Ford’s Theatre that night.’
‘I may have done.’ Grand sipped his port. ‘You meet a lot of people in a war.’
‘Yes,’ Sala said. ‘I’m sure you do. Still, you must be delighted. There’s a trial under way, you know, for the others – Atzerodt, Powell, Mrs Surratt, the rest.’
‘Is it likely a woman could be involved in this?’ Grand asked.
Sala shrugged. ‘Look around you, Matthew,’ he said. ‘Good men. Good company. Good – if I may say so – speeches. All washed over with excellent port. The war and that madness at Ford’s seems eternity ago, doesn’t it? Are you finding it as restful as you’d hoped? As good an escape as you’d planned?’
‘Escape?’ Grand frowned. ‘Oh, from the war. Yes. Yes.’
‘Good.’ Sala’s smile was like a basilisk’s, cold and deadly. ‘Because what you see here is a facade, old man, a passing show. Out there, in the mean streets tonight, people are dying. Some will perish of disease, the hacking cough, the tortured lung. Others will fall, drunk as the dead, into Old Father Thames, and his coldness will lap them. Some wife will cross her husband and he will kick her to a jelly with his hobnailed boots. Some tart … some tart in the Haymarket may meet her last customer.’ And he grinned and cackled like a harlot. ‘’Ello, ducks, lookin’ for some company?’
Grand looked at the man. This was a side to George Sala he had never seen before. He felt the hairs crawl on the back of his neck.
‘Could a woman be involved in the assassination of the President of the United States? Perhaps not. But put the question another way. Could a woman be involved in the murder of a man in a theatre? And the answer is yes. Emphatically yes. Now—’ he leaned back and patted Grand’s arm – ‘you flag down a waiter for more port. I must answer a call of nature.’
‘Capital speech, GS.’ Gabriel Horner staggered to his feet as George Sala approached, and he shook the man’s hand.
‘Gabriel Horner!’ Sala beamed. ‘I thought you were dead.’
‘Oh, I am, old boy,’ the old newspaperman said, chuckling. ‘It’s just that I’ve forgotten how to lie down.’
‘Batchelor, a word.’ Sala beckoned the lad over.
‘Mr Sala—’ Batchelor extended a hand – ‘may I say what an honour …’
‘Yes, yes.’ Sala tugged him away from his cronies. ‘That’s more than enough smarm for one evening. I understand you are out of a job.’
‘Well, I … How did you know that?’
‘I am a journalist, dear boy.’ Sala led him to a relatively secluded corner of the room. ‘I didn’t invite you here tonight, dismissed and discarded individual that you are, for your pretty face.’
‘Oh, I—’
‘Shut up and listen. Do you want your job back? On the Telegraph, I mean.’
‘Of course,’ Batchelor said.
‘Right. I want to introduce you to someone. And I want you to watch him. Use whatever powers of persuasion you have. If he so much as farts, I want to know about it.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Grand.’
Batchelor stepped back. ‘Your guest of honour?’
‘There’s only one guest of honour here tonight, Jim, my boy. And that’s me. Captain Grand has come to London to forget. The war. The blood. Bla, bla, bla. But I’m not sure it’s that simple.’
‘I don’t follow.’
Sala spun him round so that his back was to Grand, who was making small talk with a sub-editor on the top table. ‘Look, I can’t say too much. But I can tell you that Captain Grand was at Ford’s Theatre the night Lincoln was shot.’
‘My God!’
‘And he may be involved.’
‘Involved? You mean …?’
‘Come, come, lad,’ Sala hissed through gritted teeth. ‘I’d expected rath
er more from a man like you. I had heard great things …’
‘What do you want me to do?’ If Batchelor had been a trifle warm with the port, he was stone cold sober now.
‘Get to know the man. You’re doing an article on him for the Telegraph. An American’s view of the Civil War, what he thinks of London, that sort of thing. Human interest piece. And you’ll report to me every day. Clear?’
‘Er … what if he doesn’t go along with it?’ Batchelor asked.
‘Tell him you’re working on the Haymarket murders.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve got to know our brave captain reasonably well over the last few weeks. He has a morbid fascination with sudden departure, believe me, probably because of Lincoln. He’ll be hooked. I can’t stay with him; he’ll smell a rat. But he doesn’t know you and won’t suspect. Come on, I’ll do the honours. Oh—’ Sala pressed a hand against Batchelor’s jacket. ‘And I should warn you, he carries a gun. It’s a point thirty-two calibre Colt, and he wears it in a shoulder-holster. Here.’ He patted Batchelor’s chest.
Then Sala whirled back to the smoke-filled room. ‘Matthew Grand, I’d like you to meet James Batchelor. You two will get on like houses on fire.’
The next day, James Batchelor walked carefully down Fleet Street, heading for the Cavendish on Jermyn Street, where Matthew Grand had taken a room. He was remembering all over again why he didn’t like drinking port; there was nothing wrong with the drink at the time, of course, but afterwards it seemed to lie heavily in his stomach, his head and his feet in equal measure, and making due progress down the street seemed much more difficult than it should have been. He surveyed the city through slitted eyes; the spring sunshine seemed to have added glitter this morning, dazzling off brass nameplates and wrought-iron railings.
‘Jim!’
His name rang through the fog in Batchelor’s head. Turning it very slowly, he saw Dyer and Buckley standing outside the Telegraph offices, looking not a little bleary themselves. He nodded to each man carefully.
‘You look as if you may be a man with a mission, Mr Batchelor,’ Dyer said, his voice croaky with too many of George Sala’s cigars the night before.
‘I am, Dyer, thank you for noticing.’ Batchelor was relieved that he perhaps didn’t look as dreadful as he felt. ‘I have a job. Just a freelance one, you know. It may lead to more. But I am just off to see Matthew Grand at his hotel.’
‘Grand? Sala’s guest from last night?’ Buckley was amazed, and anyone within earshot would have known that at once, just from his tone. The big American was a bit of a mystery, and Buckley was piqued that Batchelor might be the one to crack it. ‘You’re a lucky man.’
Batchelor shrugged his shoulder. ‘Well, right man at the right place at the right time, Buckley,’ he said. ‘It could have been any of us, I suppose.’ The ‘suppose’ put across his message loud and clear. ‘I can’t stop, though. I don’t want to be late.’ And he spun on his heel, waited for his head to catch up, and was on his way before either journalist could think of a witty riposte.
John Herold was terrified. His legs had no feeling in them below the knees, strapped as they were to his stirrups, and for hours, it seemed, that damned old Negro whose transport they had commandeered had been wailing about how he had a murderer’s blood on his hands, in his wagon. It would never come off. They had bundled Herold, stumbling and cursing in the darkness, into the rat-scurrying hold of the John S. Ide on its way to the Navy Yard. Even in the darkness of night, he knew this place. It was within blocks of his home on Eighth Street, and his dad had been a clerk here. For hours he’d been trying to explain to the men of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry that he didn’t know what was happening, that the man they’d just killed in the blazing barn at Garrett’s Farm was a madman he’d met on the road, a madman who had forced him to go along with him at gunpoint.
Riding with the Sixteenth that night was Colonel Lafayette Baker. With his slow drawl and shambling gait, Herold appeared stupid enough, but nobody put one over on Lafayette Baker. He would work on Herold later. For now he was shackled with the other conspirators, the sparks ringing off the shackles in the darkness of the Montauk’s hold and Herold mumbling incoherently under the canvas hood.
It was well and truly light by the time John Wilkes Booth lay on a carpenter’s table on the ship’s lower deck. No one knew how long the autopsy would take, least of all the surgeon-general himself, so a canvas awning was slung overhead to shield the grisly work from prying eyes at the other end of telescopes and even from the sun itself. Joseph Barnes began his work at a little after ten, surrounded by the officers detailed to be there by Secretary of War Stanton himself.
Lafayette Baker strutted backwards and forwards. His once-handsome face was gaunt and bearded, the carefully Macassared hair greasy and unkempt. He hadn’t slept, and his back was in agony after days in the saddle. He wanted all this to be over, and not even the satisfaction of having caught Lincoln’s killer sat well with him.
‘The cause of death,’ Surgeon-General Barnes was muttering to his assistant, ‘was a gunshot to the neck. The ball entered just behind the sternocleido muscle … er …’ He placed his tape against the probe. ‘Two and one half inches above the clavicle, passing through the bony bridge of the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae … Am I boring you, Colonel?’
Baker stopped pacing. All eyes under that canvas were fixed on him and Barnes. ‘Just tell me,’ the colonel said, ‘is this son of a bitch John Wilkes Booth or not?’
Barnes sighed and put his tape down. He tilted the dead man’s head, pointing to the neck. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘a scar shows the presence of a fibroid tumour. I understand from my colleague Dr John May of this fair city that he removed that for Booth a couple of years back. And here—’ he held up the corpse’s left hand – ‘the initials JWB. I understand from the son of a bitch’s sister that he carved that tattoo on himself when he was a boy. Funny how Indian ink lies on paper, but never on skin.’
Baker grunted something and marched off, Cousin Luther in his wake. ‘One more thing,’ he growled as he reached the Montauk’s gangplank. ‘Did the bastard suffer?’
Barnes looked down at the body and resumed his work, talking in the same quiet tone as his assistant wrote down every word. ‘Paralysis of the entire body was immediate, and all the horrors of consciousness of suffering and death must have been present to the assassin during the two hours he lingered.’ The surgeon-general looked up at Baker. ‘In layman’s terms, Colonel, yes, the bastard suffered.’
The Cavendish was quietly imposing, one of the oldest hotels in London, and when Batchelor pushed open the ornate glass door he found himself in opulence which was many steps above his usual station. Staff in livery scurried to and fro with silent concentration on their faces, every one with a mission to please. Luggage was efficiently whipped up stairs, was brought downstairs to be disposed into waiting cabs. Maids in frilly caps bustled up the stairs with freshly laundered sheets, wafting past the journalist on a lavender scented breeze. He realized he was staring, but didn’t seem able to close his mouth, which was hanging slightly open. He shut it with a snap when a voice murmured in his ear.
‘Can I help, sir? Or is sir looking for the tradesman’s entrance?’ Insolence was only just overlaid by subservience. The next sentence, it warned, could go either way and could end up with sir on the pavement with a flea, as opposed to hot breath, in his ear.
Batchelor pulled himself together. ‘I’m here to see Captain Grand,’ he said.
The owner of the voice, a slightly built man in a suit so perfectly fitting that he could have been born in it, moved behind the desk, as though on castors, and ran a perfect, pale and elegant finger down the page of the ledger.
‘No Captain Grand here,’ he said, with a barely concealed sneer. He raised a hand to call over a beefy youth who was stacking luggage in a corner. He raised an eyebrow at Batchelor, waiting for the next move.
‘Mr Grand?’
&n
bsp; The elegant young man closed the ledger and folded his hands on top of it. ‘Tell me, sir,’ he said, with the slightest hesitation before the last word, ‘do you intend to go through the whole range of names until we find one with which I can agree?’
‘I have an appointment with Captain, or Mr, Matthew Grand this morning in this hotel. If you are intent on making things difficult for me, I’m afraid that I will have to make sure that he knows of the difficulty, who is to blame and why I did not keep the appointment. I will also have to tell the newspapers, specifically Mr Thornton Leigh Hunt, editor of the Telegraph.’
The young man looked slightly less self-satisfied, but otherwise held his ground. ‘We do have a Mr Grand here,’ he said, distantly. ‘I will see if he is in.’ He went out through a door behind the desk and was gone a few minutes. He returned with a smirk. ‘Mr Grand is Out,’ he said. Again, he folded his hands on the ledger, and now the smile was edged with ice.
‘Out?’ Batchelor said. This was marvellous. Not only had he traipsed halfway across London, he had made a fool of himself at this hotel and had also made a fool of himself in front of Buckley and Dyer. Of all the pompous, self-satisfied …
‘Mr Batchelor?’ The voice behind him made him jump. He turned round and found it was Grand, immaculate in a suit of rather foreign cut, a perfectly tied cravat at his throat, a perfectly groomed felt hat in his hand. ‘Am I late? I just went out for a walk while I was waiting for you and rather lost my way. I’m sure Theodore here has made you comfortable?’ He smiled, looking from one man to the other, willing them to like each other.
‘He has been …’ Batchelor, wordsmith by trade, couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
‘Mr Grand,’ Theodore said, apropos of nothing, and then lapsed into a confused silence.
Grand looked again and saw more accurately what had been happening. He took Batchelor by the elbow and led him to the door and then out on to the pavement. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Theodore will be sorry, too, that he was rude when it comes to the time to tip. However, you’re here now; can I tempt you to some coffee? Is there a coffee house around here?’