“Hoo,” he said.
“What are you, a bleedin’ owl?”
He placed his free hand on his chest and said it again.
“Oh, that’s your name! Well, I’m Deacus. Damien Deacus. Pleased to meet you, Mister Hoo.”
He shook his head. He pointed at the pictures on the side of the wagon. Pictures of him, standing over people, with flashes coming out of his eyes. I didn’t get it. Well, the drawings weren’t much cop.
“Doctor,” he said, when he’d given up on me ever cottoning on.
“Who is?”
“Yes,” he said.
He took me inside and lit a lamp. I hadn’t never seen anything like it. It was like, I don’t know, a museum on wheels. There was shelves everywhere and on them shelves was bottles and jars with all sorts of strange things in them: animals in coloured liquids, like they’d been pickled - animals the like of which I ain’t never seen. And there was gadgets with workings like clocks and puppets, all sorts of puppets. I was quite taken with the puppets on account of I ain’t never had no toys to call me own.
Doctor Hoo gestured, inviting me to touch the puppets, and I picked up a clown and waved his arm a little bit. Then a copper holding a truncheon. I picked him up and all and made him bash the clown on the head. And Doctor Hoo made a noise and I thought he was angry only when I looked at him I could tell he was laughing.
I could see too that the door to the wagon was wide open. He hadn’t locked it, hadn’t even shut it. It was like he knew I wouldn’t run off.
It did occur to me. To have it away on me plates, taking a couple of them puppets with me. I’m fast, you see. You have to be if you want to keep out of reach of the peelers. Hoo moved further in, to show me something else, and giving me a clear shot at the door. I could go. Just go, taking the clown and the copper with me, one for me and one for Squeaker who is a little nipper I sometimes bunk with, and he didn’t look like he would even try to stop me.
But, for some reason, I didn’t go. I stayed where I was, and looked around at all the stuff he’d got in his wagon.
“Here,” I said. “What do you do? In the circus, I mean. What’s your act?”
He picked up a gadget, a circle on a stick, and the circle was painted with black and white spirals on it and he gave it a whirl and the spirals twisted before my eyes. He pointed it at his own face and pretended to go into a trance.
“Oh!” I laughed. “You’re a wossname. A nipnotist.”
He bowed and put the stick back where it belonged.
“And you do puppets on the side?”
He made a gesture that was neither yes nor no. He beckoned me to a table. There was a puppet of a dog, lying on its side. Doctor Hoo clicked his fingers at it - not easy to do when you’re wearing gloves, I reckon - and the little dog sat up. It whirred like the insides of a clock and turned its head and I swear it looked right at me, because its tongue came out and it yipped at me. Doctor Hoo clicked his fingers again and the dog lay down again.
I dared to touch it.
“It’s warm!” I said, stroking its coat with my finger. I tried clicking but the dog took no notice. Only Doctor Hoo could bring it to life. I looked at him with wonder, this peculiar man, stooping in a wagon he was too tall for, his face like a carved mask, and his work all around him, and I thought I’d never seen anybody like him, there was nobody like him in all the world, and I knew I didn’t want to go nowhere else. I wanted to stay with him and find out more, and play with his marvellous toys.
“Yes,” he said.
“Yes what?” I said. Because I was sure I hadn’t said nothing out loud.
“Stay,” he said, gesturing at the wagon.
“Well, well, well,” said a voice from the doorway and I didn’t need to turn around to see who it was. Brutus. “Ain’t this a pretty picture!”
“How did you find me?” I said, backing away so there was a table between us. Brutus stepped in - he was never one to stand on ceremony - and he pulled something from around his back and threw it at the floor.
“I’m sorry, Deacus!” cried the thing and I saw it was Squeaker, sobbing his little heart out.
“Last time I tell you nothing,” I said and it sounded harsh when I said it, and perhaps I should have been kinder because you never know what’s going to be the last thing you say to somebody, do you?
Brutus lifted his leg and brought his hobnail boot down on my little matey like he was an insect in his path. And I heard a crack, a sickening crack, and Squeaker was dead, his head hanging loose and at the wrong angle. Like one of Doctor Hoo’s puppets. Brutus grinned, treating us to a view of the crooked black stumps of his teeth.
“Turns out you can’t trust nobody these days,” he said, reaching for me. The stench of him, all piss and gin, filled the wagon. “You’re coming with me or you’ll get the same as that little rat.”
He spat on Squeaker’s body.
“I ain’t!” I screamed. “I ain’t going nowhere. Am I, Doctor?”
“O-ho!” And it’s like Brutus saw Doctor Hoo for the first time. “Who’s going to stop me? This bunch of firewood?”
Hoo didn’t speak. He reached for that circle on a stick thing and held it in front of Brutus’s mush.
“What’s this? A lollipop?”
And then the circle began to turn. Faster and faster and Brutus couldn’t take his eyes off of it. And Doctor Hoo’s other hand is making signs in the air. Signs of walking, signs of claws. And Brutus, looking dazed and stunned, spins around on his heels and marches out of the wagon.
“Where’s he going?” I said. But of course, Hoo didn’t tell me.
I rushed to the doorway and watched Brutus stride away, like a clockwork soldier. I was glad to see the back of him - it’s his best feature, apart from his absence - but what happened next I was not expecting. He went right up to the lions’ cage and climbed on top. The lions was asleep. He undid the lock - there was a trapdoor on the top for when the cats needed feeding, I shouldn’t wonder - and Brutus drops himself through it and into the cage. Well, the lions was wide awake by this point and growling and roaring - I can be moody too if my sleep’s interrupted - and then they catch wind of him and how could they not? And that’s it for him. Doctor Hoo pulled me, but gently, inside and shut the door so’s I wouldn’t have to witness the lions making a meal out of that brute Brutus.
“Well, that was unexpected,” I said, marvelling at the spinning circle.
Hoo put it away and then he stooped and picked up poor Squeaker, who ain’t never had no luck in all his short life, and he put him on the table. And I couldn’t help thinking of all the other nippers back in the tenement. They was free, weren’t they? But who would come next? Who would be the next Brutus taking advantage of them? And would he be worse?
Hoo picked up some tools and some little wheels and I guessed what he was going to do.
“No!” I cried and I slapped the tool from his hand. It was a bold move but I was upset, wasn’t I? “You ain’t going to make no puppet out of my friend.”
And Hoo looked at me, reading me, and I guess he saw something that made him change his mind.
He wrapped Squeaker in a cloth and we took him outside and buried him in a corner of the field. I was sorry to say goodbye to him; he was my only friend. But on the bright side, he was away from all this worldly suffering, which is something no kid should ever have to deal with, and I wouldn’t have to worry about leaving him behind.
“Secret,” said Hoo when we was back in the wagon.
“Not half,” I agreed. Even though he was only an urchin, was Squeaker, the coppers don’t like it when they turns up dead. It’s like the only time anybody cares about the likes of us.
Hoo hitched up a bottle of sauce to the wagon and it clip-clopped us away from there, away from the circus, before the show was
even over.
“What’s his name?” I said. “The horse.”
“Never introduced,” said Hoo, flicking the reins. It took me a while but it dawned on me that he had made a joke.
We spent a couple of years riding around, visiting villages and what-not in the back of beyond. I learned a few tricks of the trade and Hoo let me work some of the puppets because I was good at giving them voices and making the kids laugh. And while he was doing his bit with the grown-ups, making them fall asleep and cluck about like chickens and I don’t know what, I would go into the crowd with me cap held out so they could pay for their entertainment. I might have said it before but old habits die hard and so what if I helped myself to a wallet here and a handkerchief there, I wasn’t hurting nobody. Until Hoo found out about it and he pinned me with them eyes of his - he never needed to use his spinning circle on me. And I said all right, all right, I wouldn’t do it no more and I even went around the crowd putting stuff back. I think I got all the stuff back in the right pockets and if I didn’t I hope they just thought it was all part of the show.
After that, we stopped doing the villages and come back into London where Hoo rented himself a gaff on Weymouth Street. Proper swanky and no mistake. And I said, here, wouldn’t you rather be around the corner on Harley Street and he give me one of his long, cold stares, what I guessed meant No. And he put away his puppets, locked them away on the top floor, and I was made to wear posh clobber like I was a butler or something and it was my job to welcome people at the door and show them in when the doctor was ready to see them. It was easy work but it weren’t half boring, I can tell you.
He made a lot of brass on account of all his clients was posh gits and toffs. He used his spinning circle on them to convince them their aches and pains was all gone. Worked like a charm, it did.
At night, he taught me to read. Or rather he stood over me until I taught myself, sounding out the letters, putting the sounds together to make the words. It weren’t easy but I picked it up, sooner rather than later on account of me not being as thick as I look. And it was all going well but of course, nothing ever goes well forever. Something always goes wrong, don’t it? Something always happens to spoil things.
Remind me to tell you about the Lord Mayor’s dinner.
Ten
Kipper did something he hadn’t done in a long time. He went home. He rented an attic flat in Fulham, a tiny space with a bed, a washstand, and a chair on which he draped his clothes - and there were not many of them. It wasn’t cheerful but it was cheap and the landlady, Mrs Plum, liked having a copper in the house because it kept her other lodgers in check, even though that copper was hardly ever there. Kipper was a spectral figure, a bogeyman whose name Mrs Plum invoked should anyone prove too rowdy, drunk, or behind with the rent.
The creak of his foot on the lowermost stair brought Mrs Plum from her ground floor apartment like a jack from its box.
“Hoo-hoo, Inspector!” she flagged him down with a handkerchief. “Have you caught the bastard?”
Kipper, frozen in the act of climbing the stairs, frowned at his landlady. “And which bastard might that be, Mrs P? City is crawling with them.”
“You know...” she leant toward him and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Him. Foggy Jack!”
“No!” said Kipper sharply. “Not yet.”
“Oh.” Mrs Plum straightened; she didn’t like his tone. She would have to tell the Inspector about him - oh, damn it, he is the Inspector. “Only I just thought, what with on account of your being here. Because you said you wouldn’t rest until you’d catched him.”
“Do I look rested?” snapped Kipper. “Mrs P, you know and I know I am not at liberty to discuss with you the progress or otherwise of my investigations. I’ve just come back for a bit of a kip, a wash and brush-up before I hurl myself back into the fray.”
“Oh. Sorry I’m sure.” Her fingers toyed with the handrail. “I’ve a lovely bit of stew on the go if you’d like some. Fresh bread and all.”
She looked up at him with lonely widow’s eyes. Kipper’s stomach rumbled audibly.
“That settles it!” she laughed. “It’ll be ready in an hour.” She pouted coyly and twisted a lock of her silver hair. “I could bring it up...”
“No, no!” Kipper said, a little too quickly. “I’ll come down. An hour, you said. That’ll be lovely.”
Despite his fatigue, he bounded up the stairs two or three at a time, all the way up to the top of the house. He shucked off his overcoat and threw it and himself onto the narrow bed, pulling his hat over his face. Kip would not come. He was a Kipper who could not kip. His mind raced through the facts of the case so far, over and over, until everything blurred together like a broken kaleidoscope.
One thing he was sure of: this Doctor Hoo figure had something to do with something...
“Coo-ee! Inspector!” Mrs Plum sang from the other side of the door. “Dinner’s ready.”
Kipper groaned. The doorknob rattled. He sprang from the bed in a panic. If that woman got in, he’d never get her out.
“I’ll be right down!” he called back.
“Rightio,” she replied. He listened to her padding away. When he was sure he was safe, he undressed, washed his face, hands and armpits and put on a clean shirt. One thing about Mrs P: she provided an excellent laundry service and kept his ewer filled with clean water.
With fresh face and clearer mind, he skipped down the stairs. He rapped on the door to Mrs Plum’s living room with his knuckle.
“Come in!” she trilled from the other side. Steeling himself to repel all boarders - or rather, all landladies - Kipper went inside.
The room was in darkness, save for a single lamp at the centre of the table. There were two place settings - Kipper’s heart sank to see they would be dining alone, but the delicious aroma emanating from the earthenware tureen was irresistible.
“Do have a seat,” said Mrs Plum, gesturing at the only other visible chair. Kipper pulled it out and sat.
“What’s this then, Mrs P? A séance?”
“Hardly. Just a humble meal between friends.” She ladled a steaming, lumpy helping into a bowl and held it out. “Wait until you get your gnashers into my dumplings.”
Kipper cleared his throat. “Look, Mrs P-”
“Call me Ophelia.”
“Listen, Mrs O. This is all jolly decent of you and all but...”
The dish was withdrawn. “Don’t flatter yourself, Johnny.” She slammed the bowl on the table causing a tide of stew to surge over the rim and onto the cloth. “I don’t know; you treats a man nice, with kindness and respect on account of him being a copper and bringing a bit of prestige into the house, and he ain’t got no wife to look after him, and he thinks you wants to get your claws into him and all manner of indecency, what I ain’t never even dreamt of.”
She blew her nose into her handkerchief. Kipper was guilt-stricken. He rose from his chair.
“I’m sorry, me old duck,” he said. “Look: I’ll take charge, shall I?” He took up the ladle. “You let me do the work for a change.” He whisked a tea towel off a small basket. “Bread roll, modom?”
Mrs Plum giggled like a girl forty years her junior. “Don’t mind if I do,” she simpered.
Gawd help me, thought Kipper.
They were interrupted by thunderous knocking at the front door. Mrs Plum muttered something colourful and stood, dropping her napkin onto her place mat. She left the room and presently Kipper heard a voice he recognised. He joined Mrs P and the visitor in the hall.
“Adams! What is it, man?”
The sergeant nodded a salute that was also an apology. “Ever so sorry, sir, to intrude on your little soiree.” He looked askance at the landlady and lowered his voice. “Only there’s been developments.”
The inspector’s eyes slid si
deways to Mrs Plum, who was doing her best to appear aloof, patting hairpins back into place. Clearly, she was hanging on their every word.
“I’ll get my coat,” Kipper announced and bounded up the stairs.
***
Adams brought Kipper up to speed with the latest developments during the cab ride back to Bow Street. The fingerprint boys had isolated a set of prints common to every crime scene, belonging to none of the doctors nor any of their staff. The team was checking through the records to see if the prints matched those of any known villain.
“Then we’ll know who we’re looking for,” Adams concluded, adding quite unnecessarily in Kipper’s opinion, “Great bunch of lads, them Scotland Yard boys.”
“Ah,” said Kipper. “But what if they don’t find a match? What then, eh?”
“Ah, well,” Adams combed his beard with his fingers. “That’s just it, sir. Any suspects we bring in, we takes prints off of them and then see if they matches.”
“I see.”
“They’ll show you how to do it.”
“Who will?”
“The Scotland Yard boys.”
“Show me what?”
“How to take somebody’s prints.”
“I’m not a complete idiot.”
“Yes, sir - I mean, No, sir.”
They arrived at the nick. Kipper was dismayed to find it had been annexed by that great bunch of lads from good old Scotland Yard. The air in his office was thick with smoke from their pipes. Might as well stay outside in the peasouper, he coughed.
“Hail, Johnny! Well met!” A grinning face emerged from the murk along with a hand for Kipper to shake - which Kipper studiously ignored. “Bigby of the Yard,” said the face, teeth clenched around the stem of his malodorous pipe. Bigby’s hair reeked of Macassar oil. Revolting, Kipper shuddered.
The unshaken hand clapped Kipper on the shoulder. “You’ve arrived in the nick, what! I say! That’s rather good, isn’t it? Arrived in the nick - as in the nick of time, and nick as in police station, as I believe the vulgarians call it.” He addressed the room. “I say, lads! Did you hear that? The inspector here has arrived IN THE NICK!”
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