Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness
Page 26
Once again, there was only silence in response.
He made his way groping down the Stairs. Perhaps he could swim for it, he thought. But he had never been a strong swimmer—never a strong anything if he was honest about it—and he was sure that before he was even half-way across the broad river he would succumb to exhaustion, and sink into oblivion.
He had reached the bottom of the Stairs, and his shin banged against something hard. A boat! By some miracle, one of the watermen—probably too drunk to know what he was doing—had left his boat moored where anyone could take it.
He felt along the edge of the boat until he came to the mooring rope. A miracle, he thought again—the possibility of escape when all such hope had seemed to be gone.
Working in almost total darkness—and with trembling hands—he clawed at the professionally tied knot that kept the boat tethered to the landing stage. As he worked, one small corner of his mind registered the fact that the swishing sound behind him had stopped. But there was no time to consider such matters now, when all his energy—all his will—had to be directed to getting the boat free.
He felt one of the fingernails on his right hand break, but ignored the short, inevitable, stab of pain. He twisted and tugged at the knot, knowing he should he more methodical, yet being unable to discipline himself into adopting a more rational approach. And finally, after what seemed a lifetime, the knot slid apart in his hands.
He put a tentative foot into the boat, and felt it move. But of course it moved! Now that he had untied it, what was there to stop it from moving? He lifted his other leg, lost his balance, and fell clumsily on to the floor of the craft.
Something was digging into his side, and he realized that it must be one of the oars. He picked it up, and poked it blindly into the darkness in the general direction of the landing stage. He felt the oar make contact, and then the prow of the boat swung away from the shore and towards the middle of the Thames.
But the stern stayed where it was!
The boat was tied up at both ends! He should have checked on that before he got in. He awkwardly manoeuvred himself round until he was in the right position to find the second mooring rope. Yes, there it was, and there was the knot holding it.
He wished he had brought a knife with him, so he could have sliced through the rope with one smooth movement. But he hadn’t thought to bring a knife. There were so many things he hadn’t thought to bring. Perhaps that was why he found himself in the position he was in now—because he hadn’t planned ahead, but had relied solely on instinct.
Even as he grappled with the second knot, he could picture his father, watching the whole process and shaking his head in a gesture of censure and despair.
Yes, Father, he thought, I’ve failed again.
Except that this time it wasn’t just the Earl he was letting down—this time it went far, far beyond the bounds of his narrow, censorious family.
The knot finally started to give at the same moment as he heard the violent crash behind him and felt the boat lurch violently. And then, almost before he’d had time to register what was happening, a pair of powerful hands had pinned his arms behind his back, and something cold and sharp was being drawn across his throat.
He wondered how they had managed to get so close to him without his hearing them. Wondered, too, how he could know he was in pain and yet not really feel hurt. Then he stopped wondering—and everything went black.
Part One: Aldermans Stairs
One
The small crowd had formed almost as soon as the police rowing boat landed. At first it had been all of a huddle, and there was a real danger of the two Wet Bobs being forced down Battle Bridge Stairs and into the river. Then the senior of the two Thames policemen had ordered the mob to step back, and—reluctantly—it had. Now it formed a broad semicircle, so that those people who were at either end were perched perilously on the edge of the wharf, while those in the centre had their backs pressed up against the wall of the nearest warehouse.
From their various vantage points, the individuals who made up the crowd—costermongers who kept one of their eyes on the scene and the other on their barrows, trading company clerks with manifests tucked under their arms, watermen who spent most of the day rowing customers across the river, and the ne’er-do-wells who habitually hung around hoping to earn a dishonest shilling—all strained their necks to get the best view of what was happening.
There wasn’t a great deal to see. The two policemen stood almost like statues, and the sausage-shaped object they’d pulled out of the river was completely shrouded in a tarpaulin.
The sergeant swept his eyes over the restive mob, then leaned towards his partner. ‘I’ll be glad when somebody from Scotland Yard finally gets ’ere,’ he whispered.
‘Yer can say that again,’ the constable agreed.
And almost as if he had been waiting in the wings for his cue, a ‘somebody’ from Scotland Yard did appear. The new arrival was at least a head taller than anyone else on the wharf. He looked around him, assessed the situation, and then—seemingly effortlessly—induced the tightly packed mob to crush together even tighter in order to create a path for him.
A bit like Moses partin’ the Red Sea, thought the sergeant, who had had the Bible—and very little else—thoroughly knocked into him when he was a pupil at the Lant Street board school.
The tall man reached the front of the crowd, and came to a halt in the open space between it and the tarpaulin sausage. It was not just his height that made him stand out, the sergeant realized, although someone nearly six feet tall was a bit of a novelty. The man’s face, too, was striking. The sergeant ran his eyes over it quickly, taking in the details just as he’d been trained to. Bushy eyebrows formed two arches over sharp, penetrating eyes. The nose below them was large and almost a hook. The mouth was wide; the chin solid and square. The impression of Moses had been spot-on—though if the man really had been Jewish it would have been most unlikely he’d have been working for the Met.
The Scotland Yard man looked at the two river policemen in turn. ‘Inspector Blackstone,’ he said crisply.
The sergeant saluted. ‘I’m Sergeant Roberts, sir. An’ this ’ere is Constable Watts.’
The Inspector nodded, as if he had already known that, and was only testing their truthfulness. ‘Are you the ones that found him?’ he asked the sergeant.
‘That’s right, sir,’ Roberts agreed.
‘When and where?’
‘We were on the six o’clock shift,’ Roberts explained. ‘We start out from Wappin’ an’ go up river—’
‘Get to the point,’ Blackstone said—though not unkindly.
‘As we was drawin’ level wiv Battle Bridge Stairs, we saw this thing caught up in the ropes of a barge that was moored in the middle of the river. We didn’t know what it was at first, but as we got closer, we could see it was a body.’ Roberts shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘An’ that’s about it, sir. We pulled ’im on board, rowed to the shore, and ‘ere we are.’
‘Let’s have a look at him then,’ Blackstone said.
The sergeant glanced first at the crowd, and then back at the Inspector. ‘What about all these people, sir?’ he asked.
‘It’s a shame to disappoint them after they’ve waited so long,’ the Inspector told him.
If you’re sure, sir...’ the sergeant said tentatively. Blackstone raised his head and looked into the crowd in such a way that almost every member of it blinked.
‘We’re taking the tarpaulin off now,’ he said in a large, authoritative voice he had not used previously, ‘and if any of you moves so much as an inch forward, I swear I’ll have you. Understand?’
Several heads nodded to indicate belief and acceptance. Satisfied, Blackstone turned back to the sergeant. ‘Let the dog see the rabbit, then.’
The two river policemen knelt down and rolled the corpse out of the tarpaulin. Then, when they’d straightened up again, the Inspector bent down in their place.
; Blackstone frowned. ‘This isn’t good,’ he said. ‘This is trouble.’
‘What is, sir?’
‘We’re not looking at one of your average dockland murders here. This man isn’t even a local.’
Roberts ran his eyes over the corpse’s clothes—jacket fraying at the cuffs, trousers that had seen better days, boots scuffed at the toecaps. ‘He’s dressed like a local, sir.’
‘Agreed. But look at his face.’
The sergeant examined the dead man’s features. ‘I see what you mean, sir,’ he admitted.
The murder victim was probably twenty-three or twenty-four, Blackstone estimated, but his was not the early-twenties face usually seen in the area—a face that was already showing signs of starting to lose the struggle for existence, and proclaimed, more eloquently than words ever could, that the owner of the face was no more than twelve or fourteen years from the grave.
No, there was none of pinchedness of growing up in poverty on this face. None of the lines earned by working long hours from the age of twelve or thirteen. What he had here, the Inspector decided reluctantly, was the corpse of one of the Quality.
He let his eyes travel down to the throat, and examined the deep jagged gash that ran the whole length of the jawbone. ‘Nasty,’ he said, more to himself than to anyone else.
And the killer hadn’t been satisfied to merely half-sever the head. The chest was pitted with at least a couple of dozen stab wounds as if the assassin couldn’t quite accept he’d already accomplished what he’d set out to do.
‘So what d’yer make of it, sir?’ asked Sergeant Roberts.
‘Well, it’s either murder or the most determined case of suicide I’ve ever seen,’ Blackstone told him.
Roberts raised an eyebrow. ‘Beg pardon, sir?’
Blackstone sighed. ‘If you want to get on in the police force, Sergeant, then the first thing you have to learn is to laugh at your superiors’ jokes—however bad they happen to be.’
The sergeant grinned. ‘Right, sir, I’ll remember that.’
The Inspector lifted one of the dead man’s limp hands, and examined it critically. ‘Any thoughts on this, Sergeant?’
Roberts peered down at the hand. ‘Broken finger nails,’ he said after a few seconds’ scrutiny. ‘But ’e doesn’t look to me like the kind of bloke ’oo’d ’ave broken ’em at work.’
‘Agreed.’
‘An’ there seems to be a strand of somefink caught under one of ‘em.’
‘Rope fibre,’ Blackstone said firmly. ‘And where was a young gent like him likely to have come into contact with rope?’
‘Dunno, sir,’ the sergeant confessed.
‘By the river. The broken nails indicate haste, the rope points to a boat. I would suggest he was trying to free a boat from its moorings when he was murdered.’
‘You might be right, sir,’ Roberts admitted.
‘How long do you think he’s been in the water?’
The sergeant turned his gaze to the face again. ‘Not much sign of ’im swellin’ up yet. I’d say it couldn’t be more than a few hours.’
Blackstone nodded his agreement. ‘In other words, he was murdered sometime in the early hours, right by the riverside. Have you got a tide timetable on you?’
‘Don’t need one, sir,’ the sergeant said confidently. ‘Down at Wappin’, we know the tides better’n we know our own names. It started to ebb at twelve minutes past three precisely.’
‘So assuming we’re right about when the body entered the water, it would have been carried up river for a short time. Then, if it hadn’t been caught up in the mooring ropes, it would have been swept out to sea.’
‘That’s about the size of it, sir.’
Blackstone let the corpse’s hand drop back to his side, and was just on the point of standing up when he noticed the dead man’s left eye.
‘What do you make of that, Roberts?’ he said, pointing. ‘It’s bruised.’
‘You’re right. But I don’t think that happened when he was getting his throat cut. Do you?’
Roberts shook his head. ‘From the way it’s healed, I’d say he got that particular injury at least a couple of days ago.’
The black eye might—or might not—be connected to the murder, Blackstone thought. Only time would tell.
He stood up. ‘When you get back to Wapping, have a word with your comrades who were on night duty, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Find out if they saw anything suspicious.’
‘I’ll do that, sir,’ Roberts promised.
Blackstone nodded. He was sure that the sergeant—who seemed a conscientious officer—would make every effort to follow his instructions. But though he had made the request himself, the Inspector doubted that Roberts’ inquiries would turn up anything remotely useful—because he already had the feeling that this was a crime in which nothing would come easy.
To download the book and continue reading, click here.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Saturday—Monday: Lost Weekend
Tuesday: Dead on Arrival
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Wednesday: Gone, but not forgotten
One
Two
Three
Four
Thursday: The White Devil
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Friday: The horror! The horror!
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Extract from Blackstone and the Rendezvous with Death by Sally Spencer