‘No, a razor job will most certainly not suit me,’ Bickersdale snapped. ‘If I’d wanted him murdered, I’d have had him shot while he was up at the mine. But a murdered policeman—or even one who suddenly disappears—gets other policemen asking questions I’d really rather not have them ask.’
‘I thought you wanted him killed.’
‘Oh, I do. But I want him to have a fatal accident, to which there will be no witnesses. And I want you to arrange that accident. You have no objections to that, I take it.’
Huggins’s smile widened. Whatever he’d promised the solicitor, he’d been planning to do Blackstone over anyway—and the fact that he was doing it with his boss’s approval was just the icing on the cake.
‘I don’t have no objections at all,’ he said. ‘How will we do it?’
‘Blackstone has been showing an unhealthy interest in the salt works. If he had an opportunity to take a closer look at it, I’m sure he would. And I plan to create that opportunity for him.’
‘An’ then what happens?’
‘Think about it, Huggins. What sort of accident could you have in a salt works?’
Mick Huggins frowned; then his grin returned, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah!’
Bickersdale stood up, and walked to the door. ‘Make yourself available in the morning. I’ll get word to you when I need you.’ He opened the hatch, looked around outside, then turned back to face Huggins again. ‘Oh, by the way…’
‘Yes, Mr Bickersdale?’
‘That girl who disappeared yesterday…’
‘What about her?’
‘It turns out that she was raped, strangled and then thrown into one of the flashes.’
‘Yes, I heard that myself.’
‘Was it you? Were you the one who did it?’
‘Oh no, Mr Bickersdale; I swear it wasn’t me.’
The mine-owner gave the boatman a smile that chilled his blood. ‘Liar!’ he said pleasantly.
*
The dinner, which the Chief Constable of Staffordshire had invited Superintendent Bullock to, was supposed to be no more than a pleasant social event, but Bullock had other ideas. He saw it as an ideal opportunity to attempt to outflank all the local opposition and wrest possession of Lucy Stanford’s corpse from their hands.
Bullock launched his undeclared campaign with the arrival of the game soup. ‘You might consider allowing Dr Carr to perform the autopsy,’ he remarked casually. ‘She’s said to be quite brilliant at her job—and she does have Home Office approval.’
‘This isn’t any reflection on you personally, Bullock, but I’m sick and tired of the people in London thinking that they can run our affairs for us,’ the Chief Constable replied, as he sucked the soup through his thick moustache. ‘We’re not exactly country yokels up here, you know. My own medical examiner—Charlie Waddle—is a perfectly sound sort of chap.’
The Scotland Yard man nodded, and bided his time. ‘Perhaps Dr Carr and Dr Waddle could perform the autopsy together,’ he suggested over the Beef Wellington.
‘Charlie Waddle would never stand for that,’ the Chief Constable informed him. ‘He’s a firm believer in keeping women in their place, and—unless they’re dead—that place certainly isn’t in the police morgue.’
By the time they reached the nightcap stage, Bullock had decided he had no choice but to adopt desperation tactics. ‘Dr Carr wants to get her hands on the girl’s body very badly...’ he said.
‘I’m sure she does. But we can’t always have—’
‘...and I want to get my hands on her body very badly, too.’
The Chief Constable almost choked on his brandy. ‘Fancy her, do you, old man?’
‘It’s a little more than that,’ Bullock said, hating himself even as he lied. ‘It’s becoming a positive obsession with me. I just can’t sleep at night for thinking about her.’
‘Well, you old ram!’ the Chief Constable said. ‘And am I to suppose that if she doesn’t get what she wants, she won’t let you have what you want?’
‘Yes, she’s made that very clear.’
The Chief Constable tut-tutted. ‘These modern women,’ he said. ‘They’re little better than whores, when you think about it.’
‘True,’ Bullock agreed, and then, hating himself again, he added, ‘But you must admit, she’s a very tasty whore.’
The Chief Constable thought it over for a while. ‘Don’t like to see any colleague of mine going without his oats,’ he said finally, ‘especially when he feels that they’re oats he’d particularly enjoy. I’ll have a word with Charlie Waddle first thing in the morning. He won’t like it, but since he’s coming up for election as Grand Master of the Lodge—and since he’s going to need my support to get it—he’s not likely to kick up too much of a fuss, either.’
‘Thank you,’ Bullock said.
‘I mean, it’s not as if either Charlie or your Dr Carr is likely to learn anything from examining the body, now is it?’
‘Quite,’ Bullock agreed—and immediately sent word round to Ellie Carr’s lodgings that she could begin her autopsy the first thing the next morning.
*
Jamie Green had taken refuge in an abandoned pottery on the edge of town, but he knew that he could not stay there for ever—because even if the police didn’t find him, hunger would eventually drive him out into the open.
When they caught him, the police would be bound to blame him for what had happened to Lucy, he told himself, and in so many ways, they would be quite right to do so.
His darling girl would never have left her house if it hadn’t been for him.
She would never have met the monster who had killed her if it hadn’t been for him.
It was all his fault!
He heard a scuttling sound in the corner, and turned just in time to see a big rat disappear under a pile of rubble.
It would not be the only rat in this building, he thought. There were probably legions of them hiding in the brickwork. Perhaps, when he fell asleep, they would all come out of hiding and pounce on him. There would be hundreds of them, digging their needle-sharp little teeth into his body. He wouldn’t be able to defend himself, and though he might roll around the floor, screaming in agony, they would hold on—ripping at his flesh, gnawing at his bones.
Yes, perhaps that was what would happen. Perhaps he would die in excruciating pain. And perhaps, after all that had gone before it—all he had allowed to go before it—that would be no more than a fitting end.
*
It was a little after midnight. Blackstone had been asleep for half an hour, and he was back in the cave in Afghanistan again.
No, not in the cave, but outside it—shielding his eyes from the blazing sun, trying to get his thoughts straight.
‘He was out here waiting for me when I came out of the cave,’ Tom Yardley says, pointing down at the dead Afghan. ‘He got off the first shot, and I’d have been dead myself if his rifle hadn’t jammed.’
Blackstone looks down at the man. There is something not quite right about that wound in the Pathan’s chest, he tells himself, but somehow he can’t put his finger on exactly what it is.
*
Blackstone awoke with a sudden start, his heart beating like a drum roll, his pulse throbbing at twice its normal rate.
Why, when he had not thought about that particular incident in his Afghanistan adventures for years, was he suddenly having this same dream about it over and over again?
He fumbled in the darkness for his cigarettes, and lit one up. The answer was obvious, he decided, as he inhaled the acrid smoke. He had not thought of Tom Yardley for years, either, but it was only natural that Tom’s letter—and his own presence in the village where Tom had met his sudden and convenient death—should bring those days back to him.
And yet, now that he thought about it, he wasn’t actually having the same dream at all.
What was happening was that each time the dream intruded, it was getting shorter, so that now it didn’t featu
re the inside of the cave at all. It was almost as if there was some part of his sleeping mind that was honing the dream down—focusing it on what really mattered.
But that made no sense at all. Why should it need to be honed down? What was the point of focusing on any of it? Afghanistan was long in the past. It could have no possible bearing on what was happening at that moment.
Blackstone stubbed his cigarette in the ashtray and fell immediately asleep again.
Friday: The horror! The horror!
One
Thick black smoke poured out of a hundred or more tall brick chimneys. The winding gear at a dozen rock-salt mines creaked and protested as it lowered men down to the drift or brought the results of their labours up to the surface. On the canal, the narrow-boats, pulled by stolid horses and loaded down with salt, were just setting out for their next destinations. In the railway marshalling yard, salt trucks were being coupled to engines bound for Liverpool and Manchester, London and Glasgow. It was eight o’clock in the morning, and another working day was already well under way.
Blackstone was crouched down in the confined space between two large industrial ash cans and the wall of the Jubilee Salt Works’ boiler room. He had taken up this position over an hour earlier.
This was not the ideal hiding place, he thought. In fact, if he was honest with himself, he’d have to admit that it was a bloody awful hiding place—a hiding place in which anyone really looking would have spotted him straight away.
But nobody was looking. And why would they be? Why would it even occur to a passer-by that any man would endure such obvious discomfort, merely for the opportunity of getting a clear view of the Number One Pan?
There was a part of him that kept repeating that this was all a complete waste of time. But there was another part, a stronger one, that was continually reminding him that though this surveillance operation—like many others he had taken part in—would probably get him nowhere, there was always just a chance that it might!
*
Entering the Stafford Police Morgue felt not unlike walking into enemy territory, and Ellie Carr and Jed Trent were treated with icy disdain by everyone from the uniformed officer who admitted them through the front door to the clerk who showed them up to Dr Waddle’s office.
The doctor himself was even less welcoming. ‘I’m allowing this in order to oblige the Chief Constable, who happens to be a good friend of mine,’ he told Ellie, ‘but that doesn’t mean I think it’s right.’
‘If you’d like to be present during the autopsy—’ Ellie suggested.
‘If that’s what I wanted, then I would be—with or without your permission,’ Waddle interrupted her. ‘But I believe in solid, well-tested procedures, and I’ve no wish to be associated—in any way—with the latest fashionable ideas that you people from London have come up with. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll introduce you to the corpse, then get off to my game of golf.’
He led them down to the morgue. When they reached the doorway, Ellie stopped and looked around her.
If Noah’s Ark had had its own morgue, it would have looked just like this one, she thought.
The dead girl was lying on a marble slab, covered by a white sheet.
‘I’ve had her stripped and washed,’ Waddle said.
‘You’ve had her what?’ Ellie demanded, outraged.
‘I didn’t want a young lady like you to have to handle a dirty corpse, so I had her cleaned up. But it wasn’t easy, as you’ll understand when you see the cadaver yourself, so I hope you appreciate the effort we’ve made.’
Before Ellie had the chance to question both Waddle’s intelligence and his parentage, Jed Trent stepped between the two doctors. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’d get to that golf course of yours as soon as you can, if I was you. Looks like it might rain later.’
Waddle nodded, turned on his heel, and left the morgue.
Ellie Carr, frozen to the spot, was clenching and unclenching her hands angrily. ‘He’s had her washed!’ she said. ‘The stupid bastard’s gone and had her washed!’
‘He might not have done too much harm,’ Trent said soothingly.
‘On the other hand—and this is much more likely—he could well have destroyed vital evidence!’ Ellie countered.
‘Let’s have a look at the body,’ Trent suggested, taking the corners of the sheet between his thumbs and forefingers and stripping it away.
The girl’s body was in an even more horrific state than they’d anticipated. The deep cuts covered her entire frame, and none was more than two inches from the next. Several of Lucy’s ribs were exposed, and her intestines were spilling out of her stomach like a long, malignant worm.
‘Why did he do it to her, for God’s sake?’ Jed Trent wondered. ‘If he wanted to hurt her parents, surely slashing her face and cutting off her hands and feet would have been enough?’
‘And if he’d done it for his sadistic pleasure, the cuts would have been much more frenzied and haphazard in their nature,’ Ellie said, taking a surgical gown from the nearest peg and slipping it on. ‘But this is all so...so controlled.’
‘What you said last night is starting to make a lot of sense,’ Trent told her. ‘He didn’t do this to send us a message; he did it to hide something from us. But I’m buggered if I know what it is.’
‘I’m buggered if I know either,’ Ellie agreed. She reached across to the instrument tray for a scalpel. ‘Let’s just hope the corpse can tell its own story.’
*
Lawrence Bickersdale strode into the yard of the Jubilee Salt Works with more of the air of a man who owned the place outright than the demeanour of a mere shareholder. He stopped in front of the Number One Pan to light a cheroot, then pushed the double doors open and disappeared into the steam.
Blackstone, now in his second hour of crouching behind the ash cans, found it hard to believe his luck. He’d been hoping he would see something suspicious—a package being passed, money changing hands—but he’d never imagined that Bickersdale would be so reckless as to expose himself at the centre of his operation.
It was ten minutes before the mine-owner emerged from the pan again, and when he did, he looked inordinately pleased with himself. Standing in front of the pan, he lit a second cheroot from the stub of his first, and set off in the direction of the salt works’ office.
Blackstone shifted position a little, in an effort to ease the cramp in his leg. There could have been only one reason for Bickersdale’s visit to the pan: the man had some more jewels he wanted to move, and was going ahead with it, despite the presence of a Scotland Yard detective in the village!
His arrogance was almost incredible, Blackstone thought.
He seemed to think he could be as blatant in his illicit dealings in England as he had probably been in the Congo Free State. Well, he’d soon learn he was wrong about that.
*
Jamie Green was awoken by a gentle prodding in his side, and when he opened his eyes, he saw that a uniformed policeman was standing over him.
So the rats had not eaten him after all, he thought. Instead, they had decided to condemn him to another day of living hell.
‘What’s your name, son?’ the policeman asked.
‘James Green.’
‘We’ve been looking for a Jamie Green all night.’
‘And now you’ve found him.’
‘But are you the right Jamie Green? The one who we’ve been looking for had ideas above his station—thought he could mix with the local gentry as if he was one of them himself. Is that you?’
‘I never wanted to mix with the gentry,’ Jamie said tiredly. ‘I just wanted to be with my Lucy.’
‘Lucy? Is that the dead girl?’
‘Yes, it’s the dead girl. The beautiful, wonderful, dead girl.’
The constable nodded. ‘I’m going to ask you to stand up now, Jamie,’ he said. ‘I want you to do it very slowly.’
‘All right.’
‘And once you are standing, I’d l
ike you to put your hands behind your back so I can handcuff you. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘I understand.’
‘Good. Start now. And remember what I said about doing everything slowly. I don’t want any trouble.’
‘And you won’t get any,’ Jamie promised him. ‘Not from me.’
*
Joshua Watkins, the manager of the Jubilee Salt Works, normally expected even shareholders in the company to knock before they entered his office, but having taken one look at the furious expression that filled Lawrence Bickersdale’s face, he decided that now was not the time to object to the fact that this particular shareholder had simply burst in.
‘Is something the matter, Mr Bickersdale?’ he asked.
‘You could say that,’ Bickersdale replied. ‘I’ve just paid a visit to Number One Pan.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because I own a part of this company, and I can go and inspect my investment any time I damn well please!’
‘You misunderstand me,’ Watkins said hurriedly. ‘What I meant to ask was, did you find something going on there that wasn’t to your liking?’
‘I found that you’ve so little understanding of how to run a salt works that they’ve employed a bunch of thieves, if that’s what you mean,’ Bickersdale snapped back.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘And well you might. When I entered the pan, I was wearing the diamond tie-pin that my dear grandfather left me in his will, and when I left the pan I didn’t have it any longer.’
‘Are you sure that you actually put it on this morning?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that one of the men took it?’
‘There was simply no other way it could have gone missing.’
‘Well, this is distressing,’ Watkins admitted. ‘And you may rest assured that I’ll question all the men as soon as they’ve finished their work.’
‘You’ll question all the men now!’ Bickersdale said.
‘You want me to go down to the pan myself, and—’
‘I want you to summon them to this office immediately, so that we can both question them.’
Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness Page 16