Lawless and the Devil of Euston Square

by William Sutton

In Burton’s Colosseum, the vista of London from the top of St Paul’s Cathedral was realistic enough to give me a vertiginous moment. I sent a constable.

  The next day, I went good and early to St Paul’s itself. An enthusiastic verger showed me enough nooks and crypts and passageways to conceal an army. By the time we climbed to the Golden Gallery, above the dome, I was not only out of breath, but in panic. As I emerged onto the outer terrace, the force of the wind shocked me. My stomach lurched as I peered out across the city.

  I tried to steady my nerves, looking for places I recognised. All I could see were targets. To the south, the Greenwich Observatory, and of course Brunel’s tunnel under the Thames, where Berwick’s father had been ruined. The new bridges at Lambeth and Chelsea. The vaulted roof of Victoria Station.

  And the British Museum Library. Its rotunda, nestled in the great museum’s heart, was impressive as any. I was struck with a sudden fear for Miss Villiers, and determined to drive there forthwith.

  “Some kind of disturbance down by the river,” said the keen-eyed verger. I could make out nothing. “Oh yes. Parliament Square’s quite full of people.”

  With a horrid sensation creeping through me, I flew down the steps, past the Whispering Gallery, and headed for Westminster in the utmost haste. As I pulled off the Embankment, who should I pass but Glossop, trudging disconsolately out onto the bridge. We exchanged a few pleasantries through clenched teeth.

  “What the devil are you doing down this neck of the woods?” I said.

  “Only protecting Westminster Bridge. That’s my lot, Yard boy,” he scowled. He looked at the sky as if it would not surprise him in the least to be attacked by squadrons of hawks, or men from the moon. “Against what I’m not sure, but I’m protecting it.”

  I looked at him. What could be more absurd than trying to protect yourself from a terror that had no name? Glossop knew only that the powers that be feared some dark havoc.

  Berwick, I reckoned, would like this description. Such was the mayhem his threats caused. It made me see for the first time quite how angry he was, angry enough to make fools of us all. Angry at the careless rich for stealing his love. Angry at a world that applauds injustices; at the System, and its grinding inescapable quirks—the same things that had left me, only months before, ready to throw up my hands and give in.

  Clerks and politicians were pouring onto the grass by Parliament. God almighty, what had happened? I found Wardle inside the base of the clock tower, where I was disturbed to see a hydraulic engine.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “Watchman?” He turned to me, a hunted look in his eye. “I couldn’t get it checked in time. It’s a warren. A thousand offices, a million cupboards. Wine cellars like football pitches, tunnels as far as Leicester Square.” He glanced upwards. High above us a platform was swaying. He checked his watch, looked anxiously at the engine, and tugged me outside. “Five minutes now.”

  “You evacuated, sir?”

  “They moved it forward without telling us, the fools. Wanted it up and running for the Exhibition. They went and brought Bertie without asking me.”

  “He’s here?”

  “I sent him home,” he said wearily. “They’re livid about it.”

  We took our place among the hordes. They had stopped the traffic around the square. Politicians mingled amiably with passers-by, every one of them looking up at the bell tower. Palmerston and Disraeli were playing chess. It was a shambles, an undeniable shambles.

  “When did you find out?”

  “Early morning. I’ve had people combing the place for hours.” Wardle looked at me restlessly. “I had this feeling in my gut, poring over those threats. I’ve got it, you see. Who slew the beast? St George, weren’t it? Fellow obviously sees himself as some latter day saint, riding around, slaying dragons. And what day is it today?”

  “St George’s Day.”

  “The Monstrous Rotundity, well, that bell weighs four tons. Big Ben, they call it.” He put his fingers to his brow. “And it’s a bloody clock, isn’t it?”

  I looked up, recalling that first night at Euston. Pat had spoken of clockwork affixed to the hydraulic devil: mechanisms that Berwick removed in one place, he had used to set off spouts in another.

  “You see? What alternative had I? I had none.” Wardle turned to the crowd. “Stay back now. Keep back!”

  Darlington scurried out from the tower towards us and my heart leapt into my mouth. “No trace, sir,” he said, beaming. “No sign of Davy’s dust. No little Guy Fawkes. Not even Robin Hood and his Merry Men.”

  Wardle scowled at him.

  “Hulloah, there, Sergeant,” said James Wyld, MP, holding out a hand in greeting. “Didn’t realise it was you lot putting on the show. Nicely done. Fine sense of drama.” Just then, melodic bells pealed as prelude to the hour. “Tally-ho,” said Wyld and with all the melodrama of a circus ringleader, began calling out, “Ten seconds! Nine! Eight…”

  A hush fell across the crowd. It was impossible not to imagine an explosion. Would the tower shake? Would it buckle? Crumple onto the House? Or topple down upon us all?

  Into the silence exploded the clang of the great bell. Once it tolled. Twice, and no explosion. By the fifth peal, the crowd burst out into applause. They kept clapping and cheering, with a few catcalls mixed in, until it reached the twelfth and long after.

  THE METROPOLIS SURGEON

  That evening, I stopped in to carry out my checks at the British Museum Library.

  “He would never strike here,” said Miss Villiers as we settled in to our tearoom. “A man like him? He might wish terrible vengeance on his enemies, but he wouldn’t destroy the greatest resource of learning in the country.”

  I told her of our fiasco in Westminster, outlining Wardle’s interpretation of St George and Big Ben.

  “Ah, no,” she said. “It’s very specific. ‘The monster is slain in his tortuous lair.’ It was always a dragon that St George slew, and you never see any pictures of its lair. Besides, why say ‘his’ lair? Only if it was part beast, part person.”

  I frowned. “One of your mythological beasts?”

  “The minotaur. He’s half bull, half prince, from the queen’s unholy congress.” She looked at me steadily. “His tortuous lair is the labyrinth.”

  “Which is round and monstrous.” I put my head in my hands. “You have it.”

  “Oh, I have more than that,” she said and called for more tea.

  * * *

  Wardle went quiet when I presented Miss Villiers’ interpretation. Borrowing Ruth’s turn of phrase, I explained that we had been fools. The threats, far from being random menaces, all alluded to kings, or sons of kings, slain by righteous avengers. The writing on the wall for Nebuchadnezzar. The minotaur, slain by Theseus in the labyrinth. All the way to Cromwell and King Charles, the guillotine and Marie Antoinette. It was sobering to think that it was reasonable for Berwick to believe in revolutions; after all, his own mother had fled one.

  Miss Villiers reckoned that Berwick was styling himself as the East End hero out to kill the wicked prince—although I still did not speak of Bertie. Tracking him down through the labyrinth of London, he intended to bring down the temple upon all our heads on the final day of reckoning.

  I expected Wardle to dismiss our ideas as high-flown nonsense. Instead he spent a few moments running his finger over his calendar, then he grunted, putting his hand to his forehead. It was as if he had come to the end of his patience with Berwick’s games. He wanted to throw down his cards and call in the hand, whatever it meant paying out. “Let’s clear Bertie out of it. He’s a danger to himself. I’ll speak to the Queen. We’ll send him out of the country at dead of night without the blighter knowing. God help us, we’ve some work to do.”

  * * *

  As we headed for the Palace, I checked through the luxury accoutrements while Wardle hunched in the corner, peering at the traffic through the smoked glass. Cupboards of physic; East India brandy and orange cordial water
s; caviar and smoked salmon sandwiches; a Fortnum and Mason shaving kit; a box of Havana cigars; the Times, though which of them would read it I didn’t know; two lady’s shawls (better not to ask); a book of dirty pictures—Bertie’s, I assumed; and a children’s music box that played “Dainty Miss Skittles”.

  I descended at the Palace gates. Wardle wanted me to travel all the way to Calais with them. I had convinced him that it would be safer that only one of us was absent. The fiasco at Parliament had disturbed him. Besides, the fewer people who knew Bertie’s whereabouts, the better, until he was safely on the continent, whether in “our darling little Germany”, as Victoria wished, or in some faceless nightspot in the City of Light, as Bertie doubtless hoped.

  “Keep working on it,” he said wearily. “When I get back, we’ll dig out the little rat and tie him up by his tail. I should have done it right at the beginning. Chase up that sewer notion of yours too. If there’s new gangs of underground thieves in town, somebody will know about it. I’ll try my contacts when I’m back, but you go the official route. Talk to the authorities. All right?”

  It was more than all right with me. Compared to my usual role, this was a carte blanche. I had been expecting to have little to do in his absence, but now there was nothing to stop me pursuing my own ideas.

  I sent the bones we had collected from the thefts to Simpson. A sorrier collection I had never seen, ribs and forelegs and vertebrae, dirty and aged and brown. “I am a physician, not an anthropologist,” announced his peremptory reply, “but I will give it my attention after the university entrance examinations.”

  I decided against posting Worms outside Mudie’s Lending Library. For what could I tell them to look for? A genial chubby man, returning an Indian epic? Instead, I turned to the sewers. My enquiries turned up Joseph Bazalgette’s name at once, but his location proved harder to pinpoint. The chief officer of the Metropolitan Board of Works seemed to move from point to point as fast as lightning and rather more energetically. The Professor shuffled into the office—we used their services so much that procedures had slackened—to find me plotting the thefts on Stanford’s new map, sticking pins into the wall that formed three lines progressing westward. The wee fellow stared at the map as if it were Michelangelo’s David.

  “What, pray, is that,” he burst out, “if you don’t mind my asking?”

  I told him it was a representation of London; that is, a map.

  “Someday,” he said with conviction, “I too should like to own something akin to that particular apparatus.”

  He brought news that Bazalgette had finished overseeing the High Level Southern Branch and would be returning today to check the Low Level Northern. This was so much gibberish to me, and the latest in a series of conflicting reports of the man’s whereabouts, but I went all the same. So it was that I found myself standing in a great trench in the middle of Fulham Broadway.

  “The big man’s expected this afternoon, guv’nor,” said the foreman, a huge brute of a fellow with a shock of white hair. He gripped my hand as if to crush it and introduced himself as Slasher Fleming.

  I nodded, staring at the maelstrom of activity around us.

  “Can I do anything for you while you’re waiting?”

  “Thank you, no,” I said. “Only I’d imagined I would have to go down some kind of mine shaft.”

  He laughed. “Oh, it’s deep enough in some stretches. This bit’s what they call cut-and-cover. The navvies cut, and we cover.” He showed me how they fenced off the road ahead while the diggers advanced a channel, ten feet deep, in a rough “V” shape. Pony men wheeled the soil down to the river for the new embankments. Pumps were on hand for lying water and other run-off. To the other side, meanwhile, a team of surveyors reported on peculiarities of local drains. Smiths prepared grates and manholes. Bricklayers bricked the sides of the channel; carpenters arched it over with a timber framework; the bricklayers returned to vault over the duct; and finally the navvies surfaced the road anew.

  “A lot of bricks,” I said.

  “Only a hundred million,” he grinned, “so far. Those wee men you see with the gas lamps, inside the tunnel, they’re checking the mortar work. But if you’ll excuse us, I’d best be back at work.”

  It made me wonder what Bazalgette must be like, if this giant was awaiting his arrival with such trepidation.

  “Envisage a city,” boomed a voice behind me, “as a body, pumping with fluids.” I turned to greet a smartly dressed man with an imposing moustache. He breathed in deeply, surveying the work around him with quiet satisfaction. “Blood, nerves, intestines, bowels. The whole kit and caboodle heaving with life.” Bazalgette exuded verve and energy. Even as he spoke to me, little men began equipping us to go underground, arming us with galoshes, greatcoats and gloves. The great man shook my hand warmly and pulled on a deerstalker to top it off. “Sergeant Lawless, I take it? Pleasure. Official visit?”

  “Could we call it semi-official?”

  “You won’t mind if I carry on working. Terribly busy. Don’t require a canary, do you?”

  I looked at him in bafflement.

  “Regulations require a canary. Signal unexpected emissions. But I wrote the regulations. This stretch is secure enough.” Without further ado, he showed me to a makeshift wooden ladder. “Now, what the deuce is this about?”

  I descended as swiftly as I could. As he followed me down, I breathed deeply. “I will try to be brief, sir. Could one walk around London, vanishing in one place and reappearing undetected in another, through these sewers?”

  He nodded briskly. “Let us enter the third circle of the inferno,” he proclaimed, and strode into the tunnel, looking always about him with keen interest.

  The entrance to the tunnel was oval, or rather in the shape of an upturned egg. That is, we walked on the narrowest part; the walls rose away from us and curved into a broad arch well clear of our heads.

  “We decided early on, Sergeant,” Bazalgette said, “that a sewer through which a man cannot walk is a sewer not worth building.”

  “Like underground roads, then,” I nodded. “Is that not an invitation to loafers and footpads?”

  “No right being down here, if they’re not working for me. Ah, here is the first feeder junction. Good, good.”

  Only minutes into our walk, liquids were emerging from a grate in the tunnel wall. I avoided the questionable stream by walking with legs akimbo, but I was glad of the protective clothing, recalling Simpson’s stern injunctions.

  Bazalgette explained his system succinctly, but with undisguised enthusiasm. After years of debate at the Sewer Commission, with depositions from engineers and academics the length and breadth of the country, he was constructing five intercepting sewers of this size to divert the whole of London’s wastes away from the river, by gravity where possible, pumping where necessary. They incorporated existing functional sewers as feeder ducts. Where they were obliged to, they rebuilt to allow a fully grown man easy access. “The cost of maintaining smaller drains,” he explained, “is a menace, not to mention the danger.”

  Bazalgette interspersed this discourse with suggestions barked at Fleming and orders to the workmen. He wanted grates angled, flaws in the mortar fixed, manholes at curves in the tunnel.

  “It was written in papyrus. The Romans discovered it by chance. The stormwater drain for the forum turned out to be quite the most effective sewerage system ever. The Cloaca Maxima. Gravity carries away solids suspended in water along the bottom. Natural floods serve not to overwhelm the system but to cleanse it. Now, Sergeant,” he said, turning to me with impatient eyes in the dim light, “what is your business here?”

  “My fear is this,” I said. “Could you enter houses from here? Remove property?”

  “Tell me, Sergeant,” he chuckled, “you must enjoy those sensational French novels. Vagabonds and political undesirables hiding out in Parisian catacombs.”

  “Sometimes, sir, I feel I am in one of those novels. I have puzzled and puzzled at
a series of impossible thefts, thefts where no entry has been forced.”

  “That skeleton lark?” he said thoughtfully. “Done and dusted, ain’t it?”

  A scrabbling sound announced the appearance of a small child, jumping nimbly from an opening high up in the wall ahead. He tipped his hat to us, clearly unaware that Bazalgette was his employer, and reported to Fleming. “Good and shipshape, guv. The odd gap in the upper brickwork, but nothing like that previous. I’d call it sound.”

  The foreman slapped the boy encouragingly on the shoulder and led him back a few yards. There was something touching in their workmanlike exchange, the little urchin and the great grey brute. Fleming lifted him in his great hands and practically threw him up to another opening. The wee fellow scrambled through with a will and vanished like a mouse into its hole.

  I turned back to the engineer. “Sir, I must compare the locations of these thefts with the progress of your sewers.”

  He nodded thoughtfully and pointed ahead. “Can you accompany me as far as Millbank? There you will see that a fully functioning sewer cannot be easily navigated. Access to houses is a different matter. The connecting sewers are a motley affair. Some you could walk through, but only the smallest of toshers could wriggle up through the older ones. Only those little fellows know what is accessible and what is not. A thief blundering in would be unlikely to get out with anything intact.”

  Only the little fellows know. I could see it in my mind’s eye, a curious tosher; something shiny in a cellar; things for the taking. Why not look around, up the steps, try the cellar door? I looked up at the hole where the urchin had vanished. “Toshers, you say?”

  In the dim light, it was hard to read Bazalgette’s expression, but he took Fleming’s lamp, declaring suddenly, “Fine work, foreman. That will be all. We continue alone. You called your visit semi-official, Sergeant? Only I hesitate to cast suspicion on innocents. Unless you will give me your word that you will consider the facts in the broadest possible light, I can make no deposition.”

  I looked at him. There was something about the man I found intensely impressive. Noble, even. Besides, I simply wanted a solution. “You have my word on that, sir. We have punished scapegoats enough. I only wish to curtail the crimes.”