Lawless and the Devil of Euston Square

by William Sutton

  Filled with excitement at the prospect of unravelling the mystery, I scanned through Jackman’s summary. I found myself none the wiser. Rather than solve the riddle, he seemed simply to have ignored it. He had left out everything of importance, labelling it an industrial mishap, with not a question mark in sight. My indignation rose as I read the travesty of a report over and over. It mentioned that the corpse was sent for post-mortem, but there was no mention of Simpson’s revelation. In fact, Jackman mentioned none of the peculiarities, the clock sabotage, the mysterious repair man. There was no new evidence whatsoever, and the companies involved were exonerated from blame under the tag “accidental damage”.

  The complacency of the thing left me breathless. I stomped around the office in indignation. Was I simply to despatch this case into obscurity, like all the others? True enough, I had thrown away cases still more inconclusive than this, but it would not do to worry about that. I stood at the little window, as Wardle often did, the details of that night flooding back to me, when the door opened and in stomped the inspector himself.

  “Afternoon, Watchman. You’re working hard.”

  “Sir! Are you quite well? I thought you were going straight home.”

  “You don’t get rid of me so easy, son.” To my horror, he sat down at my desk. I hurried over to tidy the papers away but he raised a hand. “Sick of filing, Watchman?”

  “Can’t keep me from the filing cabinet, sir.”

  “Careful now. Push too hard and that brain of yours might start to function.” As he glanced over the papers, my heart pounded, but he sat back with a satisfied look. “This may be a grind, son, but I’m pleased to see it done well.” He nodded that special nod he kept for approving my plans. “Keep your head down and we’ll get through the lot by Christmas after next.”

  * * *

  All weekend I could barely sleep. I tossed and turned in my little garret, dogged by unquiet dreams. Why did it trouble me so? Partly because I’d spent so long musing on the solution. Partly excitement. I had watched how Wardle would pick up on little details and expand them into theories. Here was me, aping the great detective’s method, going over unexplained details with obsessive, if unproductive, scrutiny.

  By Monday morning, my head was muddy and I felt on the verge of illness. Wardle eyed me strangely, and my cheeks burned under his gaze. I had the job I’d wanted so long, and he was pleased with my work. Why should I care about a case long closed, that meant nothing to anybody? Better to stick to the task in hand. I tried to put the spout from my mind; but I could not.

  I formed a plan. Rather than rile him with a special song and dance, I would evaluate it on the same basis as any other case: that is, with a view to closing it. From that angle, my scruples were hard to justify. Property had been damaged, yes, but none of the injured parties had pressed charges. As long as they stood to receive insurance payments, what did it matter whether it was caused by a vagabond or an activist? If the man had been killed there, the Crown would have to take an interest, but it was hard to pinpoint where the illegality had occurred. Yet if I could get Wardle’s approval, I could later stumble on the anomalies Jackman had suppressed and open up Pandora’s box.

  While Wardle was in the office, I worked speedily through the intervening files, back to early November. Whenever he was out and about, I spent an unreasonable amount of time reading over the spout file. Only then did I notice that Jackman’s sheet was dated 10th November. That was the day I delivered my report, but I delivered it late afternoon, before my night shift. Too late. No wonder he’d looked at me sourly.

  I spent the week planning my strategy. I decided to slip the spout into the last session on Friday, hoping Wardle would give it the nod and head home. To put him in a good mood, I had accumulated several closed cases, which we sped through rapidly.

  “Then we come to Euston Square, early morning, ninth November.”

  “Night you came along?”

  “Yes, sir.” I hesitated. “Seems a little murky. Thought I’d do a few interviews. The night porter.”

  “Why?” he snapped.

  I bit my lip. I had gone over and over these justifications. “For a sober report, sir. He was drunk that night, but only he met the mysterious repair man. Then I’ll try the HECC.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Perhaps Coxhill has enemies. I’d like to hear what his engineers have to say about the sabotaged machinery. Maybe there have been other mishaps.”

  “They’ll be the last to tell you that.”

  “Then the clockmaker.”

  “The clockmaker?”

  “Yes, sir. Might have a notion who would want to steal the mechanism. I noted the manufacturer’s name.”

  Wardle raised an eyebrow. “I see your thinking, son. No need for it, though. Any more? Or can we have lunch?”

  That was all. I looked down at the file. “You must admit, sir, it was peculiar.”

  Wardle frowned a moment. “Job’s full of oddments and novelties, son.”

  I nodded, embarrassed. Of course, with those twenty years of files, he was weary of wonders, and shrugged them off. But I was tired, and I couldn’t seem to let it lie. “Begging your pardon, sir—”

  “You want to be the hero of a thrupenny novel, son. Natural enough. But don’t make work where there is none. There’s nothing to show it wasn’t an accident. Nobody was hurt—”

  “The man was dead, sir.”

  “Don’t give me that look, Watchman. Simpson said the tramp was dead beforehand.”

  I stared. So he at least had read my report.

  Wardle sighed. “Let’s assume that Simpson was right. Someone was playing a joke. Who?”

  I cast about for the most convincing theories I had come up with in the wilderness. This was a test, and if I had to show off how much research I had done, where was the harm in that? “I thought maybe the builders’ union.”

  He nodded warily. “Go on.”

  “Or the Chartists. All that business about Drains not Trains.”

  “Not the Fenians? Or the Luddites? The Anti-War League, the Anti-Poor Lobby?” He was teasing me. “Look, Watchman, something irregular was afoot, I grant you.”

  “Wilful sabotage, it seemed like.”

  “Maybe. If it was political, they’d tell someone. Otherwise why bother? I’ve seen so many syndicates and unions in my time, I take it with a pinch of salt. People don’t think they’re alive unless they’re complaining. Why give them anything? As soon as they get it they take it for granted, complain it’s not as good as it used to be, or could be, or ought to be.” He scratched his head. “Like as not, it’s something much simpler.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I’d wager that it was a kind of message from one criminal gang to another. A message we’re not meant to understand. No reason to suspect it’ll happen again.”

  “I see.” Would we leave it at that? Abandon a case that I had an uncanny instinct to pursue? Otherwise, could I disobey my new master, like a mischievous schoolboy doing exactly what his teacher has told him not to? “Is there nothing to be done, sir?”

  “Stop worrying,” he said with a penetrating look, “and get some sleep.”

  Perhaps he was not teasing after all. Behind his bluster, he seemed not just amused by my anxiety, but somehow pleased by my insistence.

  “Before the clockmaker, though,” he went on, “what about that ward book?”

  “Sir?”

  “Matron might have known something.”

  I looked at him eagerly. Was he giving me the go-ahead after all? “Yes, sir, she did. She recognised the dead man.”

  “So?”

  I hesitated. “That’s all I know.”

  “How much did you give her?”

  “Sir?”

  “Tends to loosen the tongue, the jangle of silver. Can be expensive, investigating. Find yourself short, you know where to come.”

  I looked at him in surprise. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Unless it’
s for a girl, mind.” He stood up, thrusting his hands into his pockets. “There are two ways to get on in the police. One is to be brilliant. The other is do what you’re told. If you can’t do the former, best keep to the latter.” He narrowed his eyes. “Get some rest over the weekend, son. If you have got yourself a girl, that’s your business. Only don’t come to work and expect to catch up on your beauty sleep.”

  “No, sir. I mean to say—That is, I haven’t…”

  “I don’t want to know. Let’s skip lunch and go home, eh? And Watchman, write your bloody reports quicker.”

  COVERT INVESTIGATIONS

  I took this to mean that, provided I kept up with the filing work, my free time was my own look-out. After all, as Darlington told it, Wardle had been catapulted to fame through a resourcefully solved case back in the Forties. Why shouldn’t I do the same? Moving Wardle’s suggestion to the top of my list, I started my investigations that afternoon.

  Without the doctor to open doors, I had trouble convincing the woman at the hospital front desk that I was bona fide. When I told her I was a sergeant of the Yard, she pointed me off down a dark corridor with a smirk. When I came back to her, lost, for the third time, she abandoned me to the devices of a hoary old porter. He refused to take me anywhere until he’d wormed my mission out of me.

  “I simply wish to speak to the matron known as Bunny. Do you know her?”

  “Might do. What shift?”

  “She was on nights. In the paupers’ ward.”

  “Best come to the paupers’ ward at night, then.”

  “Will she be there, do you think?”

  “Don’t pay me to think, mate.”

  I gritted my teeth. “What do they pay you to do?”

  “Shift the dead, mate, and the half-dead, and them as would be better off dead.”

  “Do you remember,” I asked slowly, “a dead man with a club foot? Name of Shuffler. Mr Shuffler.”

  “Whenabouts?”

  “November.”

  He burst out laughing. “Come off it, mate. I drag a legion of stiffs out of here every day, and their conversation don’t tend to be memorable. It’s only when nobody’s taking them I have to worry. When they start to smell, then we call the stiffsman. Not so keen, he is. It’s a pittance they pay.”

  “Very well, but this woman Bunny seemed to know Mr Shuffler.”

  “Best speak to her then,” the man replied insolently. And off he went.

  Outside, a Bibler harassed me with pamphlets: Satan in Your Hairbrush was one, Satan in the Teapot, another.

  All the way home, I kicked myself. There was no place for my polite timidity. Wardle would never have been palmed off so easily. Back home, I planned my questions, thinking hollowly of Simpson’s words: “The hospital will deal with it as normal.” What had happened to those arrangements the first time around? Who had taken the body? What was the name Bunny had mentioned, the man who had brought Shuffler in?

  Late that night, I returned, blustering past the secretary and trusting to memory to find the ward. Sure enough, I found myself back in that dismal place, amidst the oppressive groaning and moaning. The smell of disinfectants could not conceal the stench of illness.

  A plump nurse with a pale lamp approached me. I asked, in a whisper, for Bunny.

  “Useless asking me. I’m new.”

  “Perhaps you can find someone who can help me.”

  She fetched another nurse from the shadows. This second girl was bony, with a wart on her nose, and she carried a baby in her shawl, wrapped up tight as if she didn’t want me to see it. I repeated my question.

  “There’s no Bunny here.”

  “Do you know where she’s gone?”

  She stared at me unreceptively.

  “I need to know about a man who died in November.”

  “November?” she said and laughed. “Do you know how many ruffians pass through these doors?”

  “Nurse,” a voice called out from the dark, hoarse with pain. “Come to me, please.”

  Before the girls could turn away, I slipped a couple of coins from my pocket and toyed with them. Their manner changed instantly. The fat girl, all politeness now, said, “We deal with so many, your honour, we’re just glad to see the back of them.”

  I tapped my foot impatiently. “Where would they take the corpse for burial?”

  “Hard for paupers to afford burial in this town,” said the thin girl.

  “What happens to them, then?”

  “There was that train out from Clapham,” the fat one piped up. “Cemetery express.”

  The thin one laughed again. “And that vicar. Stacked coffins ten deep in his crypt. Made a mint, he did.”

  “Good God,” I said. “How big was the crypt?”

  The fat one put a hand on my arm. “Whenever it was full, he dug out a cartload and dumped them in the river.”

  “That’s how they caught him,” nodded the thin one. “Cart tipped over at Ludgate Circus and out rolled all the skulls.”

  I took a deep breath. “Please, I’d like to see your records for November.”

  They looked at each other as if I were speaking of ancient history.

  “I believe you keep a ward book.” I tossed the plump girl a sixpence and she scurried off. I turned to the other. “And Bunny?”

  “Don’t remember,” she scowled.

  I held the second coin between my fingers, wondering how Wardle would play it.

  She smiled suddenly. “Don’t mean Mrs Bunhill, do you?”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “Friendly faced woman. Dr Simpson seemed to know her.”

  “Know Dr Simpson, do you?” she said.

  “Tell me about Bunny. When will she be in?”

  “It’s Mrs Bunhill I knew.” She snatched at the coin and I let her take it. She hesitated. “She went off sick.”

  I clenched my teeth in annoyance, as the fat girl returned.

  I took the book impatiently and held it up to her lamp, flicking through the pages.

  “When did she go off sick?”

  “Months back. She must have found something else,” the thin girl went on.

  “If she’s still alive,” said the fat one. “Sir, are you quite all right?”

  I stared at the book. If only I’d come when I’d first thought of it, I might have found Bunny. It was too late now. The page I wanted, the page that Bunny had shown me so fleetingly months before, had been torn out.

  THE CLERKENWELL CLOCKMAKER

  “The Euston clock?” said the little man at Allnutt and Ganz. He squinted across the counter with an injured air. “How could I forget? Those vandals!” He jabbed at his chest. “It’s an indescribable pain to me. A torment! I was no good for weeks. The shock of it, you see. No good at all.”

  I nodded. “I’m from Scotland Yard, Mr Ganz, and—”

  “I thought you were from the Guild.” He peered up at me, his enthusiasm melting away. “How disappointing. Your lot haven’t turned up any answers, then? One of my finest mechanisms. Quite destroyed.”

  It seemed strange to think that this unappealing little man was the creator of that elegant piece. “I can understand your frustration. But I’m still hoping to track down the culprit. I take it they told you the clock was tampered with.”

  “Ha! They brought back the pieces. Not a one worth saving. Vandals! Barbarians! And no intention of replacing it.”

  “No, sir. I mean, before it fell, it had already been damaged.”

  “Poppycock. A drop of water? Wouldn’t have touched it. I made that clock to survive the worst thunderstorm in a thousand years, I did.”

  “I’m sure you did, Mr Ganz,” I said through gritted teeth, “but that’s no defence against somebody opening the back panel and stealing the main movement.”

  “Stealing the movement?” Ganz rolled his eyes, as if to ask what did I know of mechanisms and the language of his trade.

  My father used to roll his eyes the same way. I suppose the indignities I suffered were no d
ifferent from most sons. But as I grew older, I found these criticisms hard to take. Father had finicky, dextrous fingers, but my hands, from an early age, had grown large and awkward. The last straw came when I was fumbling at a silver French Oignon quarter repeater. I knew that I was clumsy, and took care to remember my own strength. With Father glancing over my shoulder, however, reminding me how important the customer was and how valuable a job it was, I lost my rag. I tweaked and tugged at the repeater, and damaged it beyond repair. It was that, along with certain other troubles, that sent me packing for the south, his criticisms ringing in my ears. Worst of all, I half-believed his criticisms: that I hadn’t the patience for difficult tasks; that I always wanted the thing solved at once.

  “Look,” I eyed Ganz squarely, peeved to be taken for an ignoramus, “it was I who was inspecting your clock, when some fool dropped the crane arm and smashed it.” I went on to describe his clock in detail: how the motion work was coupled to the long hand drive mechanism, with an extending arm back to the main movement—which was signally absent.

  At my talk of wheels and pinions, gears and spindles, a hint of respect flickered across his face. Then his mouth twisted to one side. “I didn’t know that the police studied sprockets and mainsprings.”

  I had no desire to go into my connection with the Clockmakers’ Guild. “Mr Ganz, this was no mere stealing of trinkets by children. You cannot tell me that a barbarian could so neatly remove so large a mechanism.”

  He pursed his lips. “It isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.”

  “You harbour suspicions?”

  “I suspect the lot of them.” He harrumphed. “You know how it goes.”

  “I assure you, I don’t.”