A PLEA
Skittles should be safe in Paris soon. After I’d seen her off, I breathed in the cold night air. Satisfied, I recalled the note in my pocket. Typically sensational, Groggins beseeched me to meet him at the Holborn at midnight. He would bring certain papers to make it worth my while, for he declared himself “in horrible danger”.
I saw no harm in stopping by Groggins’ place on my way. Nobody home. I thought of forcing my way in, but I had no reason to enter a property uninvited; and I had the sensation of being watched.
I cursed him. A long day I had had of it. With the Commons Select Committee looming, I longed for my bed. I went all the same.
A deep fog was descending, and the cold was fierce. I should have been at the Holborn for midnight, if it hadn’t been for the intemperate young fool who stopped me in Soho: a ruddy goat, debagged and penniless, who I recognised vaguely from Kate Hamilton’s. Typical scam. Girls never like it when a fellow bargains them down. A bilk, they call it. A fellow’s slow to realise he’s being duped at the crisis, trousers round ankles. It still impresses me how they transform the whole bawdy house just to make a fool of him.
Groggins never showed up. I waited an hour. Exhausted, I drank a glass of hot brandy. I sat, thinking of her, precious weeks before, awaiting me there at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, before it all began.
A TELEGRAM
I slept late the next day, and reached the Yard after midday. Payne called me in. He handed over a telegram.
“Dead floozy at the channel. Something to do with you?”
“Doubt it, sir.” I blinked. Death at Dover. Woman drowned. Sent by Bertie’s coachman. I put my hand to my mouth. “Though I knew her. Skittles, we called her.”
“Distraught over a common whore, Watchman?” Sir Richard gave me a look. “Have you been up to no good?”
“She was to testify, sir. I persuaded her to head for Calais to keep her safe. They got to her first.” I shook my head. “She wasn’t a common whore, sir.”
A full account of the disaster arrived in the second post, courtesy of Bertie’s cab driver. This gave me a chance to conduct an experiment. Darlington was chatting in Jeffcoat’s room. I told them all about the death, feigning I was in a state, for I feared it was my illustrious friend, Skittles. Sure enough, to my great satisfaction, that week’s Illustrated Police News carried a full spread on it. The lurid engravings even referred to her friends in the police force being unable to save her.
As the paper told it—details uncannily like the letter—the driver stationed the carriage by the water to await the ferry. At the sight of some sinister men approaching through the mist, the lady took fright, crying, “I won’t stand no more.”
She descended in haste. Perhaps she slipped. The driver swore she threw herself from the parapet. The sinister men proved they had no ill intention by helping the Port Authority fish her out, but too late; only her shawl was recovered from the brine, while a big straw hat was spotted floating away. The driver, exonerated, went on to Paris. Of the sinister men there was no further notice.
Point proven: Jeffcoat was our bloody mole.
* * *
At the Yard that afternoon, I drew up lists for the Commons Select Committee: I would need facts, persuasive witnesses, and evidence. If Sir Richard thought to truncate my investigation by pruning back the date, I must force it to blossom sooner.
I studied Dugdale-Hotten’s subscription roll and made a shortlist. I added Molly (for a netherview of the criminal method); Felix (for his Phoenix Foundation); myself, Darlington and even Jeffcoat; the 9.23 Club; and finally, Payne himself, Gabriel Mauve and Mr J.W. Brodie, who might have awkward questions to answer. Conjecture was insufficient, even perilous. Proof positive I must secure: the thefts, the memoirs, and the whole sordid world Skittles had described, I must tie together.
I sent word to friends in the House with an interest in the Great Social Evil. I shall be eternally grateful that Gladstone stood up to be counted. He may have been Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he had been a friend to Skittles, and he did not shrink from chairing this controversial Commons Select Committee.
* * *
Mudie’s Library sent word the first volume of Felix’s memoir was available. Despite my pressing duties, I picked it up on my way home and spent a fruitful hour or two perusing it in a tavern.
It covered his musical training, time with the Austrian military orchestra and establishment in Italy. My affection for him grew, as I sensed the sadness behind the text; for all his talents and achievements, his childhood had not been happy. The volume ended with his marriage, gleefully described, a hint that she was with child, and some presages of disaster.
This only whetted my appetite for the second volume, as there was no mention yet of his injury nor the secret prisons of the title. Where was his wife and family now? I sought in vain some clue to his recent behaviour. Sadness perhaps goes hand in hand with talent.
THE FILE
It was my interest in Brodie’s murder columns that brought news of Groggins the next morning. I paid Molly’s lot to scan the Ha’penny Gazette the moment it came out. One boy, an early riser, caught me as I stopped in at the Yard after a tour of night houses.
Jeffcoat too was arriving early. He ushered the boy in, amused by my methods. “This boy wants to inform you of the unfortunate death of an Irishman.”
Unfortunate death indeed, on the very night I was detained from meeting him. It was only the passing mention of his origin that gave it away. The paper called it suicide. He had hanged himself in a privy, at the club next door to the Holborn, exclusively for gentlemen. The Gazette delved no further, but the place was known for unnatural passions, and its privies for forbidden encounters.
The body was gone before I reached the morgue, but Dr Simpson told me it smacked of suicidium manu aliena. Involuntary suicide. Blackmailers often exploited illicit love; men who refused to pay met unkind ends. That Groggins was prey to such blackmail I doubted, for he loved women; Simpson retorted that one never knows a man’s true passions.
Groggins knew he was in danger. He was Brodie’s scribe. With my report to the Select Committee looming, and secrets to keep, this was no suicide.
I cursed my stupidity, and stomped straight in to see Payne, for I must comb Groggins’ apartments before anyone else got to them.
The commissioner had loafed out to a cosy political lunch. I would have to drag someone down to Mayfair with me, both to give my search authority, and in case of danger.
Darlington was at his desk, but he was asleep. He was always asleep these days. He looked done in. I wouldn’t trust him to tie his own shoelaces.
Jeffcoat saw me standing indecisive in the doorway. He sized up my anxiety with a glance that seemed to say, “Whatever it is, Watchman, I’ll come. Whatever our differences, you can rely on me.”
* * *
The furniture, furnishings, pictures, all were in place. But for such a man of letters, there was one thing missing. Books.
The place had been cleared of every form of literary endeavour. The shelves were bare, the files had gone, the desk lay empty, right down to the blotting paper. A local constable was nodding on duty on the landing. Nobody had took nothing, he told us, not since he’d been there. A theft and a suicide? Unhappy coincidence. I could not see such an egotist, however frightened, destroying his own oeuvre. That egotism had done for him: his life’s work cleaned out on the very day he croaked it.
I thumped the desk in frustration. I was thinking of Groggins’ large black file, the one inscribed M—S—L—. I must find it. It would thread everything together: the thefts and their ringmaster, the erotic memoirs and their perpetrators, and the women. Too busy with Skittles, and thinking of the Committee, I had let it slip from my grasp.
Jeffcoat stood by, so patiently and uncomplainingly that I felt the overwhelming urge to confide in him. “Will you sell this story to the Illustrated Police and all?”
He laughed off my acc
usation. “That’d be Jimmy Darlington you’d want to talk to. Have you noticed his new rig? Not to mention being tight half the time, and worse.”
I rubbed at my eyes, recognising the truth now it was presented so starkly. I don’t know if I was more ashamed of trusting Darlington or suspecting Jeffcoat. “Shall we say that I have not?”
The spring sun shone hazy through the mists over Green Park. We stood at Groggins’ French windows and talked. First, the thefts. Mauve’s memoirs, I knew, had been filched via the automaton (by Bede and the Pixie, though I didn’t mention that). Jeffcoat confirmed: he’d visited an admiral and a lawyer who had been robbed while in possession of the borrowed chess machine.
The rest we guessed at. Groggins, scribe of filth, transcribed the stolen memoirs: so many confessions set down by men who should know better. Along with these, he took down a hundred reports of courtesans and ladies of pleasure. The encyclopaedia of love Groggins was assembling would be sold through Dugdale-Hotten to clandestine collectors—though darker chapters might be held back for purposes of blackmail.
“Now that manuscript is gone.” I sighed. “And the one man who might have exposed the plan. Let’s not tell Sir Richard. Not yet.”
“Why?” said Jeffcoat. “Are you after his job?”
I hedged my bets. That Sir Richard could be pressured to protect Dugdale-Hotten was enough to justify caution; no need to tar him with graver doubts. “It will all come out, if this Commons Select Committee summons a judicial enquiry.”
He nodded. “Loose threads. I’d like to pull at a few.” He threw open the French windows, standing right where Groggins had stood, making his bibulous Irish confessions to me. Why confess? What had he feared? “Horrible danger,” he wrote. He was no fool. Might he have hidden a copy somewhere?
Jeffcoat inspected the lobelia. “How on earth are these flowers still in bloom?”
“Green fingers.” I clutched his shoulder. Those flowers, garish and proud, that Groggins loved so sinfully. I unhooked the basket, dug my fingers beneath the blooms and found—nothing. I cursed, putting my soiled hands to my head.
Jeffcoat lifted the soil from the basket. There, tucked between the tarpaulin inner and the hessian lining, quite dry in spite of watering, safe from winds and fogs and sinister men: a thin manila envelope.
We ran in to the desk, dizzy with hope. Jeffcoat pulled out handwritten paper, and a black gentleman’s card, which appeared blank. The foolscap sheets bore tabular lists in Groggins’ florid hand. The first sheet was titled M—S—L— Vol 1.
Chapter 1. CW…VIM…GBM…WD…AESCG
Chapter 2. JCH…WA…AGMP…RM…GBM
Chapter 3. CJHD…WWC…P’zzi…ML…HM
And so forth. Assigned to each chapter were several sets of initials, with the odd abbreviated name, as if to remind Groggins of the full details. Some initials appeared many times. One set of initials bracketed a whole chapter. The abbreviated names could not have been more provocative: Panizzi, keeper of books at the British Museum; the editor of the Bugle, now disgraced; and other figures of public controversy.
As for the initials, there were scores of them. The chapter list was endless. The work must rival The Thousand and One Nights. This was the kind of game Miss Villiers enjoyed—if only I could risk involving her in such murky waters; if only I still saw her. And I had Dugdale’s subscription list, to match this against.
Why keep only this? The big black file was gone. What use the contents without the manuscript?
No doubt these chapter titles matched that black file marked M—S—L— where Groggins stored these erotic memoirs, some stolen, some dictated by girls.
Groggins was paid well for his work. He could not risk selling the material elsewhere. However, keeping a record of who had written what would offer him some clout. A dangerous sideline. Had he made injudicious comments or threats? Was he visited by the same men who chased Skittles into the Channel?
Most important was that title. I recalled the black volume I’d glimpsed on Brodie’s bookshelves with its own coded title—what was it now?—Eflesym or similar. Had Groggins thought to assemble these memoirs off his own bat, or was he commissioned to do it? The thefts, the publishers, and Groggins: mechanisms propelled by forces we cannot fathom.
Jeffcoat brushed off the black card. He tilted it to the pale sunlight. It was not blank. The florid lettering, like a creeping lily, showed faint in the light, debossed in black ink upon black paper.
“What does it say?” I asked. “Flowers?”
TRUCE
“Jeffcoat, it’s me, Watchman.” I knocked tentatively. “Thanks for your help.”
He observed me patiently. “Over your mood, are you?”
I bit back a sharp riposte. “If I have been a little—”
“Cheese your barrikin, you daft bat. Sit down.” He opened up a Stanford map, annotated, like mine, with red and black marks across the metropolis. He looked at me. “We are two sleuthhounds, you and I, barking at separate holes of the same warren.”
My quarrel with Jeffcoat was forgotten. If I had thought him taunting me, he had thought me aloof; if I had called him big for his boots, he had puzzled at my ill humour. I had thought Jeffcoat chummy with Sir Richard Payne; he had been digging out figures that would make uncomfortable reading for the commissioner.
I had more in common with Solomon Jeffcoat than I had imagined. The same age as me, he came to detection through his policeman father, while my experience came through watchmaking. He liked books; I liked the theatre. He spoke French; I barely spoke English (as those who disliked Scots told me often enough). He trained a tomcat named Thom to savage all other beasts in the environs of Scotland Yard; he was surprised when his colleagues complained of the carcasses it left by their beds.
We worked for three days straight. Over those long hours, we divulged everything we knew and everything we suspected. After that, I would have trusted him with my life.
Whatever Groggins’ list meant, whomsoever it implicated, I was not safe in divulging it. Not until the opportune moment. By then I must assemble trustworthy allies. What I had not expected was that Jeffcoat’s investigations might be grimmer than mine.
It was the first time I had really trusted another officer since my first days in the Yard, when I idolised Inspector Wardle. Jeffcoat had learnt his trade from Wardle too, and was just as upset when he left the Yard under a cloud. We both stood in need of an ear to bend. I liked his abrupt manner and his welcoming rudeness. His sharp nose cut through problems and his sandy hair swept them aside. “If I am not mistaken—”
“You’re not.”
“We’re looking at criminal operations colluding across the capital.”
“Run from bawd houses and public houses.” I tapped at the centre of his map. “With one sprawling behemoth at the centre.”
He nodded. “In order to fathom that influence, we’ve got to dig down to the roots.”
My eyes roved across the map. “Where do flowers bloom?” My finger came to rest where our collected annotations were densest, right beside old father Thames.
He nodded. “In the dirt.”
LINKS
The traces were fearfully hidden. If only I had got to Groggins first. He had been deep in this business. If only I had paid him another visit, we might have known sooner. Now it was too late. Especially for him.
I must try every avenue. I swallowed my pride and wrote again to Miss Villiers. She still worked, irregularly, at the British Museum Library, which held every book ever published. I posed her the puzzle of unravelling the meaning of M—S—L—. I did not mention the list of incriminating initials, nor the coded title on Brodie’s shelf. I reminded her about my reader’s pass. She preferred handling her own researches, I wanted to read Felix’s second volume and judge his tales for myself.
The weather had turned. The winds that had so long hounded us changed not to the spring we craved, but to something altogether more oppressive: fog.
I hurried back
to Holywell Street. I would lean on Dugdale and Hotten. Even if it upset Payne’s literary friends, a little shock might draw an indiscreet admission. If they were collating Groggins’ work, who was printing it? Who stood to gain?
Dugdale-Hotten was no more. Gone. Not just their shop. Half of Holywell Street had been razed. I stood gawping through the lingering fog.
An urchin asked me for money.
I took out a ha’penny and toyed with it. “Where’s Dugdale and Hotten gone?”
“The dirty writer men?”
“Where did they move to?”
“Back to jail.” The boy clapped his hands in glee. “Someone shopped ’em in.”
* * *
The far end of Holywell Street was still standing. I stopped into an antiquarian bookseller’s and asked about The Secret Prisons of Italy. I would track down Felix’s second volume somehow.
They gave me a look as if I were ordering The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. It was marked in their catalogue as a revolutionary tome. To order such books, in the current political climate, could get you noticed. Garibaldi was about to visit; republican twitterings were afoot, and anti-monarchist parades. No, they declared, they knew of no copies available.
I thought again of Miss Villiers. Normally so punctilious, she had said nothing about my reader’s pass. I dropped into the museum. The principal librarian happened to spot me. “You are of the carabinieri, no? I am Panizzi, Antonio Panizzi.”
This took me aback, as I was not in uniform.
“I saw you, at Quarterhouse, with Sir Richard. A good cause, the Phoenix Foundation.” Without pausing for breath, he grabbed my shoulder. “I have been the victim of a theft. Not here. Privately. Two weeks ago.”
“Weeks?” I restrained my irritation. Little use reporting it now, when all the evidence was gone. “What was stolen, sir?”
Lawless and the Flowers of Sin Page 16