by Stephen Hunt
I should be relieved. Now they’ll pull me off this sodding cold surveillance and put someone on the job who counts. Who would’ve thought it, after all these centuries, Captain Twist and his merry men back in the Kingdom?
In the wall by the side of the gate there was a recess with a wooden handle to pull, and the visitor placed his hand into the niche, gave the handle a tug, then yanked his flatcap down tight as the gates moved back on a counterweight. Their mark didn’t wait for the gates to fully open, he was in too much of a hurry. As soon as there was enough of a gap for him to wriggle through the space he did so, and then he was off, down the path that led up to the white marble-fronted mansion, his footsteps dragging against the gravel. The distant barking of a dog greeted the man as the main doors swung open. Too far away for Dick to see who’d allowed him inside Lord Chant’s mansion.
‘Come on, sarge,’ urged William, ‘we can follow Redlin in. We might be able to see who he’s going to meet if we can get to a window.’
‘Are you joking me, boy?’ said Dick. ‘We haven’t been ordered to do that. Now we know that the rebels have business inside the house, there’s plenty of time to get a man inside on the staff. You don’t want to be spotted creeping around the grounds — someone’s likely to take a blunderbuss to you.’
What was the boy like? Plenty of time for an agent with suitable references — perfectly forged, of course — to be inserted as a member of the household. Eager little sod.
It was obvious that Billy-boy was bridling against the older officer’s orders, but he was the junior man on this watch and while he might be giving orders to Dick next year, tonight he had to bite his tongue and keep his peace.
‘So, what do you propose we do, sarge?’
‘We wait. When he comes out, we’ll follow Redlin, see where he goes. Is that enough action for you for tonight?’
William shook his head in disgust, but Dick was beyond caring what the boy thought of him.
You’ll see, Billy-boy. Give it a few decades, and you’ll be where I am. Making some new young fool bite on the bit while you urge caution and pull your tired bones up into the cab of the hansom, lift your boots up onto the seat opposite, and take a few more hits from the flask you’re keeping warm in your coat pocket.
‘Is that it then? You’re just going to sit up there in the cab and watch?’
‘No,’ said Dick. ‘ You are going to watch, I’m going to catch up on my shut-eye now that our mark is safely tucked up over there. Just wake me up when he comes out again.’
Dick reached for his copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated Times. The front cover carried a large political cartoon of the head of the government, the First Guardian, bending over at the beach of a seaside resort while one of the underwater races, a gill-neck, was creeping out from behind the shadow of a bathing machine with a trident-like weapon to poke him up the arse. The politician’s buttocks were painted with the Jackelian flag, and he was reaching for a coin washed in by the tide, while the speech bubble rising from the gill-neck’s mouth read, ‘ Now, there’s a fine pair of plums for the picking ’.
There was still a furore being raised by the newssheets over the new taxes the great underwater empire of the Advocacy was attempting to levy on Jackelian shipping — innocently crossing international waters, or aggressively trespassing across sovereign territory, depending on whether you were human or gill-neck. But however expensive shipments of plums and other fruits from the orchards of the colonies became, this was one conflict the State Protection Board wasn’t going to be called into to provide intelligence for. There were a lot of foreigners an officer like Dick Tull could mingle with undetected, but lacking scales and the ability to breathe underwater, gill-necks weren’t one of them. Dick folded the pages over his face to mask the glare of the gas lamps. With his liquid winter-warmer circulating through his body, Dick let the tiredness slip over him, the wooden curve of the cab keeping out the worst chilly draughts as he drifted off to sleep.
It hardly seemed any time at all until a rough shaking jolted him back into the cab’s still interior. William’s face was flushed, but not this time, Dick suspected, from the scouring wind of a long wait and the rude health of the boy’s callow constitution. He’s panicked.
‘Our mark out of the big house already, is he?’
‘No, it’s not that.’ There was a look on Billy-boy’s face that Dick had not seen before. It was alarm mixed with confusion.
‘I went over the wall-’
‘You fool! If you’ve been spotted, if you’ve blown this job for us
…’ Dick jumped out of the cab, nearly slipping on the pavement’s ice. As he angrily steadied himself, Dick saw that his stumble had been noted by a bookseller a couple of houses down the street, the hawker’s tray of cheap novels covered with a piece of cloth to protect it against falling snow. The bookseller hurriedly looked away, no doubt not wanting to test the aggressive reputation a hansom cab driver carried. There was something familiar about that face, something ‘No, I’ve not been seen, it’s what I’ve seen, sarge,’ continued the young officer, speaking so fast he was almost choking on his words. ‘I was hiding in the formal garden when Lady Florence came running out, our mark Carl Redlin and Lord Chant close on her heels. They grabbed her, pushed her down into the snow, and then stabbed her with some kind of blade. Both of them. It only took a minute for Lady Florence to die, then they dragged her body back into the mansion and locked the patio again.’
‘That doesn’t make sense!’ coughed Dick, all vestiges of drowsiness vanishing as he realized what he’d slept through.
His mind reeled. Lady Florence Chant, if he remembered their briefing correctly, was a forgettable society beauty, a clothes-horse, well mannered, without a political bone in her body. She didn’t have access to Parliament. Access to her husband’s guest lists for the boring suppers she was expected to host, perhaps. Royalist rebels didn’t risk capture in the capital to help errant husbands murder their spouses, and certainly not by such an obvious route as stabbing. A fall down the stairs, perhaps. A heart attack induced by a crafty poison, maybe. But cold-blooded murder in a garden, run down like a fox to hounds when any neighbour could be staring out from one of the houses opposite?
‘Sense or not, I saw it. We have to do something!’
‘Not us, lad,’ said Dick. He felt the lines of his greying moustache, as he was wont to do when thinking or nervous. ‘We report it back up through the board. They notify the police. Let the common crushers go in there and stir everything up. If we charge into the big house, we’ll tip off any royalist inside that we’re onto them.’
‘I’ll send for the police now,’ said Billy-boy.
‘What if they arrest our mark? We need to follow him back to his nest of troublemakers, not have him locked up in Bonegate jail waiting for the noose.’
‘Didn’t you hear me, sarge? Our mark’s helped murder someone,’ said William. ‘Carl Redlin won’t be hanging around the capital after this. He’ll be gone anyway, whatever we do.’
You’ve got a point, damn your eyes. ‘Put up the sign, then,’ sighed Dick.
The sign that would indicate their horse was lame. The sign that would tell their runner on his next circuit past that they needed to send an urgent message to the board. Getting the police involved in their business, garden-variety crushers from Ham Yard, that wasn’t going to be welcome back in the board, back in the civil service’s draughty offices at the heart of the city. What was the nickname that the other civil servants called the State Protection Board? The peculiar gentlemen. And this business was getting more peculiar by the hour.
Dick Tull made William hang back as the constables summoned from Ham Yard hammered at the door of the mansion.
One of Lord Chant’s butlers opened the door, a curious expression passing across the man’s impeccably haughty face as he took in the ranks of police lined up outside. ‘How can I help you gentlemen?’
‘That would depend now, sir,’ said the inspe
ctor standing at the head of the coppers. ‘We have had an account from a neighbour who reported Lady Florence coming to something of an injury inside your garden.’
Indignation mixed with displeasure as the old butler arched an eyebrow. ‘If there had been an accident involving Lady Florence, I can assure you I would have been informed, and shortly thereafter, it would be her ladyship’s personal physician attending our doorstep, not the officers of the Middlesteel constabulary.’
‘That it is as maybe,’ said the inspector, ‘but a report has been made, and our inquiries must follow. Now then, be so good as to fetch Lord Chant.’
‘If it is her ladyship’s health you wish to inquire after, I shall not be troubling his lordship. I shall summon her ladyship, to quicken the removal of your presence and the disturbance you’re creating this evening.’
Her ladyship? He’s in for a shock, then.
Dick Tull angled his neck for a better view of the richly appointed hallway beyond the constables’ peaked pillbox-style caps. So much sodding money. How much wealth had been spent in furnishing the vast space? Alabaster-white figureheads on columns engraved with victory scenes, the ancestors of Lord Chant, their humble tradesmen’s origins unsurprisingly not reflected in the statues’ noble poise, patrician robes hardly suited to the tradesman stock of a factory owner. Dick could feel the warmth flooding out into the night, underfloor heating pipes kept warm by some great boiler in the basement of the mansion, tended by stokers and eating up an expensive supply of shire-mined coal. Such waste, such extravagance. The fuel they were using to heat that hall that would have kept Dick’s lodgings warm for a month.
I should have a hallway like this. Well, let’s see them produce her ladyship. That’ll wipe the superior smile off their man’s face, suck some of the warmth out of Lord Chant’s comfortable life. Fat rich sod. Let’s see how he copes in a prison cell. It won’t be warm inside Bonegate Jail. Nobody waiting on him hand and foot, no summoning breakfast with a pull of a chord by his bedside.
There was one thing that Dick Tull had to say about Lady Florence. She looked good for a dead woman. She certainly looked better than the image of her that he’d seen in their briefing. The daguerreotype hardly did justice to her long curled blonde hair, as elaborate as the gown of pure velvet that curved seductively around her arms and neck, her face as perfect and flawless as the statues she was passing.
‘An unexpected pleasure,’ she smiled as warmly as the heat of the air gushing out into the night. ‘Old Cutler tells me that our neighbours across the road have concerns about my welfare. They are dears, but it was quite a minor slip on the ice in my garden. Nothing apart from a slight mud stain on my dress and the loss of dignity secured from the fall.’ She stopped to indicate a long thin hound with yellow fur lounging around the top of her wide, sweeping stairs. ‘But Brutus does need his exercise, or he makes the most terrible mess in the parlour.’
‘You know that it’s my duty to take the dog outside, your ladyship,’ said the butler, in a hurt tone of voice, as if his personal honour had been offended. ‘Especially in this ugly weather.’
‘Then when would I take my exercise?’ said the woman. ‘I step from door to carriage and from carriage to door. My little darling keeps me company, and we exercise each other. Peace now, gentlemen, since you have taken the trouble to visit, I quite insist that you come inside out of the cold while old Cutler goes down the stairs to cook and fetches up a tray of tea and biscuits. You must warm up before you venture out once more to mind our safety. I certainly wouldn’t want to be bitten by any of those dreadful creatures with their monstrous appetite for blood.’
Dick Tull didn’t need the heat of a mug to warm him, as he held onto the bubbling outrage he was feeling towards one William Beresford. The young officer had made a fool out of him with his tale of Lady Florence’s murder. When the board’s runner had stopped at their cab halt, Dick had needed to confirm Billy-boy’s story, and present it as his own as the senior agent on duty. After all, he hardly could have admitted that he had been snoring off the contents of his hip flask inside the hansom cab when he should have been alert and watchful. It’s never made easy. Not for me.
So, this was the way the ambitious young tyke had found to get back at him. Making him look a fool in front of the board. He glanced around. Billy-boy had vanished. No doubt sniggering all the ways back to the board’s headquarters. What would Dick say to the two new extra State Protection Board intelligencers waiting outside, waiting to see if their mark made a bolt for it? Just a mistake. Sorry about that. A murder? No, it was a fall while walking the dog. It all looks the same when you get to my age. And with a royalist rebel somewhere inside the building, no doubt cultivating contacts on the staff under the guise of being a relative or peddler. If the rebel troublemaker spooked, if he scarpered now, it would be Dick Tull’s head on the block, not the royalist’s.
Old Cutler appeared leading a pair of footmen, two younger versions of himself in black livery, bearing trays jingling with delicate porcelain cups and raisin-encrusted biscuits. Well, there was no need for the night to be a complete waste of time, not now that Dick was freed from young Billy-boy’s disapproving gaze.
With the police constables’ attention focused on the bounty of the unexpected brew, and the serving staff distracted by the presence of the constables, Dick expertly removed a pair of silver candlesticks from the mantelpiece and slipped them inside his great coat. He could tell from the heft of the ornamental showpieces that they were solid silver, nothing cheap about them. They would be worth a pretty penny in the pawnshop off Ruffler Avenue where Dick kept his lodgings. That was the good thing about working for the State Protection Board, he was protected from the sort of questions asked when producing such candlesticks for sale — or even worse, getting the kind of lowball price offered to a common criminal trying to fence his wares. Dick just had to open his leather wallet and flash his silver badge of state, and all questions would gag to a faltering halt in the pawnshop owner’s mouth.
Lord Chant won’t miss it, not with factories full of toilers like me stamping out wealth for him every day. Sweating his workers in this cold, day in, day out. A new pair of silver candlesticks falling into his pockets every hour. Well, these two are for poor old Dick, so thank you, my lord commercial, here’s to you and your fat pockets, padded with more money than you can spend in a dozen lifetimes.
Dick slipped back outside, to the cab halt where the hansom cab should be, finding only a single board officer waiting — with no sign of that sly little chancer, Billy-boy. Their cab had vanished, along with the second agent watching the gates. With a terse exchange of words, Dick discovered that their mark had come out of the mansion gates while he and the constables had been inside the house. Only a couple of minutes ago, the second agent had let their mark reach the end of the street on foot, then the agent casually set off in the hansom cab, taking Billy-boy along in case he needed an extra pair of boots to drop off and follow the mark through the streets on foot. Had the rebel been spooked by the arrival of the police? Pray he wasn’t lost in the narrow alleyways of the capital.
Billy-boy’s done his work well this night. I’ve been royally rogered. He’ll get the commendation for following our mark back to his nest. I’ll be left looking like an idiot. Perhaps he’ll be giving orders to me earlier than I expected, now. Ambitious little sod.
Dick Tull put off the remaining officer’s questions about the constables’ business inside the mansion. Their masters in the board would hear about this night’s tomfoolery soon enough, when the inspector inside the house got back to his warm offices in Ham Yard and started complaining about his time being wasted by the civil service, by the peculiar gentlemen.
Dick stood there for a moment, angrily brooding, as the remaining agent left now that he’d been updated on the surveillance. Dick was about to head off in the opposite direction when he noticed it. Such a small matter, but an obvious thing when spied from afar. The hawker with the booksell
er’s tray was still at the far end of the street, and he crossed the street before the departing officer reached him. As casual as you like, crouching by a lamp-post in the shadow of Lord Chant’s high wall and sorting his stock out. In the falling snow.
The hawker had been watching them, coming and going, Billy-boy and Dick, then the extra two bruisers from the board, just a single cab at the halt, with a supposedly lame horse that was suddenly able to follow their mark exiting the mansion. Dick’s frock coat exchanged for a nondescript great coat to blend in as one of the plainclothes’ inspector’s men when the police had turned up. The hawker had been watching the agents, and he’d pegged the peculiar gentlemen for what they really were, and now he was pretending to do a stock-take on the other side of the road so the agent wouldn’t see his face… his face. His face that had been one of the mugs on the sheets of known royalist rebels! Rufus Symons, that was the bogus hawker’s name. A descendent of the old aristocracy, the kind that hadn’t needed to pay an industrialist’s share of taxes to purchase their baronial titles. The forty-second Baron of Henrickshire, in fact. The county didn’t even exist any more, while the fury at being disinherited of its wealth centuries ago still festered on.
But why would a royalist covertly watch his fellow rebels? Did the silly buggers suffer from the same factional infighting that the civil service saw? Only one way to find out the answer to that question, and in its answer, perhaps a chance for Dick to divert the board’s wrath when they brought him in to answer why the capital’s constables had been sent calling on Lord Chant for the sake of a slipped heel in the garden.