‘And what’s your name?’
‘Robertson. Hubert Robertson.’
‘So tell me, Mr Robertson, if I did have an appointment with Mr Bickersdale, wouldn’t you know about it?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Then I can’t have one, can I? But if you were to go into Mr Bickersdale’s office, and ask if I could see him, and if, you having asked him, he then said yes, I would have an appointment. Isn’t that right?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Then you’d better go and ask him, hadn’t you?’
Robertson bit his lip indecisively, and looked down at his feet.
‘What’s the matter?’ Blackstone asked, hectoringly. ‘Can’t move because you’ve got a bone in your leg?’
Robertson looked up again. He seemed terrified of doing what Blackstone had asked him to do, but equally terrified of not doing it.
‘Wait here,’ he said finally. And with that, he disappeared into the office.
‘Just a minute!’ Blackstone said.
The clerk returned to the doorway. ‘Yes?’
‘If I was on my way to ask my boss if he’d agree to see a bloke who’d turned up unexpectedly, I’d at least want to know the bloke’s name. But you never asked me, did you?’
‘No, I…’
‘Why is that? Because you forgot to ask my name? Or because you already know it?’
‘It’s...It’s because I forgot to ask,’ the frightened clerk said.
‘Then it’s a good job one of us is on the ball, isn’t it?’ Blackstone asked. ‘You can tell him that it’s Sam Blackstone wants to see him—Inspector Sam Blackstone.’
Lawrence Bickersdale was in his mid-forties. He was a tall, distinguished-looking man, with a skin that looked as if it had seen more than its fair share of sunshine. He had a wide brow, strong jaw and quick eyes, which had been assessing Blackstone since the moment he had stepped into the office.
The office itself was almost spartan in its furnishings. A large mahogany desk—which was not so much antique as merely old—dominated the centre of the room. There were two chairs—one on each side of the desk—and a cheap sofa in one corner. If Blackstone had been expecting to see charts on the walls, showing production and sales figures, he would have been disappointed, because the only thing that Lawrence Bickersdale seemed to consider worthy of display was a large map of the world.
‘Take a seat, Mr Blackstone,’ Bickersdale said, indicating the chair in front of the desk. ‘My clerk told me that you’d requested an appointment with me, but he appears to have been negligent in furnishing me with a reason for the meeting.’
‘What you mean is, you asked him why I wanted to see you, and he said he couldn’t tell you because I hadn’t told him,’ Blackstone countered.
Bickersdale smiled. ‘I can see you are a man who favours the direct approach,’ he said. ‘Very well, then, I can be direct, too. You are a police inspector. Is that right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But not a local police inspector?’
‘No, I’m from London.’
‘Which means, unless I’m very much mistaken, that you are a long way outside your own jurisdiction.’
‘That’s quite true—I am,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘The local police have a lot on their hands at the moment. A young girl has been murdered.’
‘Yes, I heard that,’ Bickersdale said, regretfully. ‘But I still don’t see what you’re—’
‘They’ve asked me to help out with the inquiry—and with a few other matters besides.’
‘But not officially?’
‘No, not officially.’
‘So you are here, unofficially, about the death of that poor girl, are you, Inspector?’
‘As a matter of fact, I’m not. The inquiry I’m pursuing at the moment is one in which I’ve had some personal involvement. Yesterday, a man called Mick Huggins attacked me in a pub in Northwich.’ He paused.
For a while there was silence.
Then Bickersdale said, ‘Yes?’
‘The attack was totally unprovoked, and, as a result of having made it, Mick Huggins was arrested and placed in the cells to await his appearance before the magistrates. Do you have any comment to make at this stage, sir?’
Bickersdale seemed to be considering the matter.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said finally, ‘unless it’s to express my deepest regret to you that your introduction to our fair town had to involve an encounter with a hooligan.’
‘Do you know the hooligan in question, sir?’
‘I don’t believe so.’
‘That’s strange.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, I really think it is. Because, you see, his bail was posted this morning—and we’ve been informed that you were the one who posted it.’
Bickersdale smiled again. ‘Have you, indeed? And might I ask what the source of that information was?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say, sir.’
‘I would guess it was an anonymous letter,’ Bickersdale said. ‘But no matter. What does this man, Higgins...’
‘Huggins.’
‘What does this man Huggins do for a living? If, indeed, he does anything at all?’
‘He operates a narrowboat.’
‘Ah, then I may well have met him. I may even have done business with him. But I can’t recall the name, which is hardly surprising since my clerk, Robertson, handles all the trivial details. And I would certainly never have even considered posting a fifty-guinea bail bond for him.’
The expression on his face showed he realized he’d made a mistake, but it was only there for an instant before it was replaced by a much blander look.
‘Fifty guineas,’ Blackstone repeated. ‘Now where did you get that figure from, I wonder?’
‘I believe you mentioned it yourself.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘I’m sure you did.’
‘I was most careful not to.’
‘Then perhaps I just assumed that for such a serious offence as attacking a policeman—even one from London, with no official standing here in Cheshire—a bail of fifty guineas would be the least that would be required.’
‘You talked earlier about “our fair town”,’ Blackstone said. ‘But it’s not really your town at all, is it? You’ve only lived here for two years.’
‘True,’ Bickersdale agreed. ‘But one’s attachment to a particular location cannot be measured merely by the calendar. There are some places that just feel like home—and this place felt like home to me the moment I arrived.’
‘And so you bought a couple of mines and a share in a salt works?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Which has me puzzled,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘Oh, I can see why you bought the mines. Any man would like to have businesses that he could truly call his own.’
‘Quite so.’
‘It’s the share in the salt works I don’t understand. That’s just putting money into somebody else’s business.’
‘A business from which I derive profits.’
‘True, but you don’t have control over the business, do you? And you strike me as a man who likes to be in control at all times. So I was wondering whether there might be some other—what you might call subsidiary—reason for your investing in the works.’
‘I’m afraid that I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Bickersdale told him.
‘No, I’m not making much sense to myself, either,’ Blackstone said easily. ‘Where did you live before you came here, Mr Bickersdale?’
‘I fail to see how that could be relevant to either the attack on you by this man Huggins, or to the murder of that poor girl.’
‘It isn’t relevant,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘I was just curious.’
‘Would you reveal to me the details of .your background, if I asked you to, Inspector?’
‘Willingly.’
‘Then by all means feel free to do so.’
‘My
mother died when I was a nipper,’ Blackstone said. ‘I was brought up in an orphanage. As soon as I was old enough, I joined the army. I served in India, fought in Afghanistan and rose to the rank of sergeant. When I left the army, I joined the Metropolitan Police.’
Bickersdale nodded. ‘Very concise,’ he said. ‘And I will try to be equally brief in return. Before I came to live here, I travelled extensively abroad for a number of years.’
‘That is concise,’ Blackstone said.
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ Bickersdale agreed.
‘Did your travels take you to the United States of America?’
‘Yes, I’ve certainly been there.’
‘India?’
‘There, too.’
Lawrence Bickersdale stood up and walked over to the map hanging on the wall. ‘In order to save you the trouble of having to list every single country in the world, Inspector, I’m quite willing to specify I’ve been here...’ (he pointed at Australia), ‘here...’ (he circled the Middle East with his index finger), ‘and here...’ (he jerked his thumb in the general direction of South Africa).
‘Do you know much about diamonds?’ Blackstone asked, as the other man was walking back to his seat.
Bickersdale sat down quite heavily. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I would have thought my question was simple enough to understand. I asked you if you knew much about diamonds. You certainly look to me like a man who’d know his jewellery.’
‘Perhaps if I’d married I would have known about it—the ladies like their men to take an interest in things they’re interested in themselves—but since I’ve always been a bachelor, I’ve never really felt the need to acquaint myself with the subject.’
‘Do you still keep in contact with any of the people you met on your travels?’
‘No, I’m afraid I’ve lost touch with them all. How about you, Inspector? Do you still keep in contact?’
‘I did hear from one of my old comrades,’ Blackstone said. ‘A bloke called Tom Yardley.’
Bickersdale blinked. ‘Was that the same Tom Yardley who blew himself up at one of my mines, just a few days ago?’
‘Well, it was certainly the same Tom Yardley who got blown up,’ Blackstone replied.
Bickersdale took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and made some display of consulting it.
‘It has been most entertaining to talk to you, Inspector,’ he said, ‘but, as I’m sure you must appreciate yourself, a man who has a business to run can only afford to spend so much time on idle chit-chat, so I think it’s the right moment to bring this conversation to a close.’
Blackstone stood up. ‘Of course, sir. And thank you so much for sparing me the time.’
‘It was my pleasure,’ Bickersdale said, unconvincingly.
Seven
It was late afternoon when Archie Patterson paid his first visit to Marlin Street in what had been a long time. The street was at its quietest at that time of day, as Patterson had known it would be. In fact, he had deliberately chosen to make his visit when it was quiet—because when a man is doing something that might well cost him his job, he wants to be observed by as few people as possible.
As he passed the pawnbroker’s establishment—a depressing place, in which the pledges were household effects scarcely worth redeeming even had the pledgers had the money to do it—he found he was asking himself if he was doing the right thing in following this plan of his.
As he reached a small corner shop—dirty windows, and only a few battered tins of stew in evidence on the shelves—he had almost persuaded himself that he should abandon the whole crazy idea. But then he reached his destination—a place that had once been a printer’s shop, but had long ceased to function as such—and he found his resolve returning to him.
He knocked on the door, and his knock was answered by a bent old man wearing very thick spectacles. The man peered up at him, and when he saw who it was standing there, his jaw began to quiver.
‘I ain’t done nuffink wrong, Mr Patterson,’ he said.
‘Did I say you had done anything wrong, Gabriel?’ Patterson inquired.
‘I served my time without complaint, an’ when I come out, I’d learned my lesson. You know that.’
‘You’re not in trouble,’ Patterson said. ‘I’m here because I’ve got some business for you.’
The old man looked really frightened now.
‘Business?’ he said. ‘What kind of business?’
‘Shall we go inside?’ Patterson asked—and it was more of an order than a request.
*
Lizzie had lost track of the amount of time she had spent in the cell. She missed Cathy. The other girl had horrified her with her willingness to embrace prostitution, but she had been a cheerful soul—full of life—and this bleak prison seemed even harder to bear now she had gone.
Lizzie wondered where Cathy was now. Probably in some house of ill-repute, spreading her legs—as Cathy had so crudely put it herself—for any man with a little money to spend. She hoped that the other girl’s new life was equal to her rosy expectations—that she really didn’t mind what was being done to her, hour after hour, night after night—but she knew that as far as she herself was concerned, she would absolutely hate it when her own turn came.
She heard footsteps in the corridor, and immediately feared it was the man who had tried to rape her, returning. But when the door swung open, she saw that it was only the boss, and that he had brought with him another man—a thin, middle-aged one—who really looked quite harmless.
‘Hello, Lizzie,’ the boss said cheerfully. ‘Are you being looked after properly?’
‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ Lizzie replied, because that was what she had been taught to say in answer to such questions in the workhouse—however bad things really were.
‘They’ve been feeding you well, and letting you have nice warm baths every day?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And no one’s tried to take advantage of you?’
‘Not since that first time.’
The boss nodded. ‘Excellent. Now be a good girl and sit quietly on your stool while this gentleman does your hair.’
‘What do you mean—“while he does my hair”?’ Lizzie asked, gripped by a sudden panic. ‘He’s not goin’ to cut it all off, is he? Like they do in the workhouse, when you have nits.’
The boss laughed. ‘No, of course he’s not going to cut it all off. Far from it, in fact.’
‘Then what is he goin’ to do?’
‘He’s just going to give it a little more shape.’
‘An’ why would he want to do that?’
‘To make you look even prettier than you already are. You want to look prettier, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Lizzie said obediently.
*
Gabriel Moore’s home would have made the average hovel almost anywhere else look like a miniature palace, but on Marlin Street it was probably no better and no worse than most of the houses.
‘Would you like to sit down, Mr Patterson?’ Moore asked.
Patterson looked at the chair he was being offered and decided not to take the risk of catching something.
‘I won’t be here long, so I’ll stand,’ he said. ‘The purpose of my visit is very simple. As I intimated when we were outside, I want you to do a little job for me, Gabriel.’
‘What kind of job? Like the ones I used to do?’
‘That’s right.’
Moore spread out his hands in gesture of hopelessness. ‘I can’t do it, Mr Patterson.’
‘Didn’t your old mother ever tell you it wasn’t a good idea to turn down a request for help—especially when that request came from the Filth?’ Patterson wondered.
‘Honest, I can’t. I ain’t got the equipment no more.’
Patterson laughed, disbelievingly. ‘An artist like you doesn’t just throw his equipment away,’ he said. ‘Even if he knows he may never use it again, he just can’t bear to get rid of it.’
‘Even if I’d got the equipment—an’ I ain’t sayin’ I have—I couldn’t do the job,’ Moore protested.
‘Of course you could,’ Patterson assured him. ‘It’s a bit like riding a bike—once you’ve learned how to do it, you never forget.’
‘Look at me, Mr Patterson,’ Moore implored him. He held up his hands for the sergeant to inspect. ‘Can’t you see how they’re shakin?’
Patterson nodded. ‘Yes, they certainly do seem to have a bit of a tremble about them, don’t they? With hands like those, any work I asked you to do for me now would be vastly inferior to what you’ve produced in the past.’
‘That’s what I’m sayin’, Mr Patterson. It wouldn’t pass muster. It wouldn’t fool a blind man.’
‘Ah, but you see, that’s the point,’ Patterson said. ‘I don’t want it to fool a blind man.’
*
Blackstone and Drayman had agreed earlier to meet in the Townshend Arms. Their plan had been that the local inspector would outline the progress that had been made in the investigation, and his more experienced colleague from London would analyse what he’d been told and suggest further lines of approach based on that.
It would have been a good plan, if there’d been any progress to analyse. But there hadn’t.
‘It’s just as you predicted it would be, Sam,’ Drayman lamented. ‘Margie Thomas’s murder was nothing more than a crime of opportunity, and we’re never going to find the bastard who did it.’
Blackstone wasn’t really listening. Instead he was thinking of the meeting he had had with Bickersdale.
The man had seemed so calm and in control—friendly enough, in a cold, amused sort of way—but even if he hadn’t let it slip that he knew exactly how much Mick Huggins’s bail had cost, Blackstone would have had his card marked anyway, because he knew a villain when he saw one.
‘The problem is that any man in town between the ages of sixteen and sixty could have done it,’ he heard Inspector Drayman’s voice echo dreamily in the back of his mind.
But why had a smart bloke like Bickersdale ever allowed himself to be saddled with a white elephant like the Melbourne Mine, Blackstone wondered—a mine in which the drift was irregular, and the seepage continual; a mine that was never going to show a profit, whatever he did?
Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness Page 14