“I’m getting there.”
“They are likely to ask you exactly how we met, but . . . Tell them what you like. Tell them you found me drunk in a gutter. Just don’t tell them about what happened at the churchyard.”
She reached for his hand. Her weathered hand was almost the color of his own. “You’re not in any trouble, are you, Bharat?”
“I’m touched you should worry.”
She chuckled. “Oh, like I say, I’ve seen you in action, it’s the others who should worry, but . . .”
His head dropped. “But . . . ?”
“But I also saw you hesitate when you had that murderous little toff bang to rights, and I saw the fight drain out of you, just as surely as you’d been uncorked. I saw someone who’s very good at dealing death but ain’t got no heart for doing it. Now, I’ve met lots of evil bastards with a sadistic streak long as your arm, who would go knocking your teeth out of your mouth just because they had too many ales and fancied swinging their arm. Evil bastards who loved dishing out pain but only to those weaker and more vulnerable than themselves. Christ only knows, I’ve been married to two of them. And what’s more, I’ve seen men who was good at fighting and could handle themselves if a brawl broke out, and who would do what they had to do given the circumstances, and maybe take a grim pride in their work, and maybe not.
“But what I ain’t never seen is a man so good at fighting as you, who had so little stomach for it.”
The Ghost watched as she shook her head in disbelief, her gray hair sweeping her skirts. “I wondered about that an awful lot, young man, believe you me. I’ve wondered if maybe you was a deserter from the army but not out of cowardice, oh no, I’ve never seen a man so brave, but because you’re one of them, what you call it? Conscientious objectors. Well, the truth of it is, that I don’t know, and from the sounds of what you’re saying now, it’s probably best I don’t know, but what I do know is that you’ve got a big heart and there’s no room in this world for people with a heart like yours. This world eats up people with hearts like yours. Eats them up and spits them out. You ask if I worry? Yes, my boy, I worry. You ask why? That’s why.”
TWENTY-FOUR
As he waited with the other men for their shift to begin, The Ghost wondered if the Templars had found what they were looking for, this artifact left by a civilization before our own, a buried record awaiting discovery. What tremendous power might it have?
His mind went back to Amritsar as it so often did—his memories were all he had now and he would revisit them with all the reverence of a devout man before a religious shrine—and he thought of the Koh-i-Noor diamond and the spectacular, all-powerful light show it had revealed, as though providing a portal to other worlds, deeper knowledge, more profound understanding—a map for mankind to find a better world.
But if it fell into the wrong hands?
He dreaded to think on it, but into his mind came unbidden images of enslavement. He saw every man and woman ground down like those at the tunnel, virtual slaves to be spat at and looked down upon, treated as something less than human by grinning masters who ruled from plushly appointed buildings. Men who took symbols and twisted their meaning to meet their own ideology. He saw agony and anguish. He saw a world without hope.
The bell rang, and the new shift barely acknowledged the departing men as they met like two opposing armies who couldn’t be bothered to fight, passing one another on the mud, clutching their precious tools. Next The Ghost descended a series of ladders into the shaft, walking along the line until he came to the face, where the digging and scooping and carrying continued—it never really stopped—and soon he was filthy. Soon they all were. There were no divisions of color in the underground; there was just whether you could work and how fast, and a cheerful or encouraging word for the man next door.
Bells were supposed to denote the passing of time, tolling on the hour. But either Marchant didn’t enforce their ringing or The Ghost didn’t hear them, because time simply trudged on without demarcation. Dig, dig, dig. The noise was the incessant scrape and clang of spades and pickaxes and the chatter of men along the line, certain voices louder than the others, the comedians who, they say, kept the other’s spirits up.
Most men preferred working on the cranes. They saw more sunlight. The metronomic to and fro of the crane served as a clock, denoting the passing of time that was absent in the trench. But not The Ghost. Down here seemed like a respite from all that. Dig, dig, dig, like an automaton. Mind wandering to home, to where he was Jayadeep again.
Besides, he was used to being underground.
TWENTY-FIVE
“Well, if it isn’t Police Constable 72 Aubrey Shaw of Covent Garden’s F Division,” said Abberline, “all the way out here in Regent Street.”
A red-faced, rotund and rather glum-looking peeler looked up from his mug and peered balefully at Abberline, a moustache of ale froth gleaming on his top lip.
“Well,” he sneered back, “if it isn’t Police Constable 58 Frederick Abberline of Marylebone’s D Division, also some way out of his jurisdiction, who can take his insinuations and stick them where the sun don’t shine.”
“Who’s insinuating?” said Abberline. “I’m coming straight out and saying that you’re playing truant, mate, and I’ve caught you bang to rights.”
It was true. Both constables were a long way out of their respective patches, being as they were in The Green Man pub on Regent Street. Abberline had thought he might find Aubrey here, seeing as how he wasn’t to be found on his patch and had a name as something of a regular. Aubrey was fond of cricket, and The Green Man was a haunt of players and enthusiasts. In the window were bats and stumps and other cricket paraphernalia, which no doubt suited Aubrey fine, as he could savor his ale without members of the public peering through the glass and seeing a peeler apparently enjoying a boozy break.
“Anyway, I’m not.”
“Well, what do you call it, then? Shirking, sloping off, showing a clean pair of heels to The Green Man to sink a brace of ales—it’s all much the same thing, ain’t it?”
Aubrey’s shoulders sank. “It ain’t shirking, and it ain’t sloping off. It’s more like skulking. No, wait a minute, it’s sulking. That’s what it is.”
“And why would you feel the need to sulk, Aubs, eh?” Abberline took a seat at the bar beside him. A barman wearing a clean white apron approached, but Abberline waved him away, because Fresh-faced Freddie didn’t drink on duty.
Beside him, Aubrey had unbuttoned the top pocket of his tunic to take out a folded piece of paper that he handed to Abberline. A crude imitation of a newspaper screamer was handwritten across the top of the page. “Have You Seen This Man?” it said, while below it was a charcoal drawing of a man in robes carrying an improbably long knife.
“The blokes at the station house are having a lot of laughs at my expense, I can tell you,” said Aubrey ruefully.
“Why would that be?”
“A double murder in the Old Nichol. I expect you’ve heard about it. I have a witness that saw . . .”
“A man in robes, yes, I did hear.”
Aubrey threw up his hands in exasperation. “See? This is exactly what I mean. The whole of bloody London knows all about my strange robed man with the very long knife. The whole of bloody London knows I’m looking for a man in fancy robes with a long knife, but no bugger apart from some old crone in the rookery has actually seen him. Mind you”—he looked sideways at Abberline—“they all know about your missing body too, Freddie. Matter of fact, and you’ll have to forgive me for thinking this, but since I heard about Freddie Abberline’s incredible disappearing corpse, I did rather hope it might take the heat off me.”
Abberline gave a dry laugh. “And no such luck?”
“No such luck. That’s why you’re here, is it? You’re sulking, too?”
“No. And as a matter of fact your robed man ha
s cropped up in my missing-body case, would you believe?”
Aubrey’s look of open incredulity was instantly replaced by another of derision. “Oh yes, I know your game.” He looked over Abberline’s shoulder as though expecting to see pranksters come chortling from the shadows of the pub. “Who put you up to this?”
“Oh, do pipe down, Aubs. I’m telling you that I believe in your robed man. That’s something, isn’t it?”
“Well, you’d be the first. You’d be practically the only one. Like I say, apart from the crone, nobody else has seen a robed man. I’ve asked every trader in Covent Garden market. I must have asked half of the Old Nichol, and you would think that a robed man with an enormously long knife would stand out, wouldn’t you? Eye-catching, like. But no. Nobody’s seen him. Nobody apart from that one witness. It’s like he just appeared—and then disappeared.”
Abberline thought. For some reason that chimed with how he felt about the stranger at Belle Isle—a mysterious figure within the mist, his motives just as much a mystery. “So who are your marks?” he asked.
“One of them was a lowlife went by the name of Boot. Petty thief. Runner for various East End gangs.”
“No stranger to the blade, no doubt.”
“Yeah, but, no . . . Actually, he was shot.”
“He was shot? What about the other one?”
“Ah, here’s where it gets sad, Freddie. It was a little girl. Got in the way, looks like.”
“And was she shot, too?”
Aubrey threw him a look. “Most people take a second to reflect on the tragedy of a little girl being gunned down, Freddie.”
“Ah, so she was shot?”
“Yeah, she was shot.”
“Right, so a witness saw a man in robes, carrying what looked like a wickedly long blade?”
“Thin as well, this blade. More like one of them fencing swords. Like a rapier blade.”
“Not a blade for cutting. For combat. For stabbing. Yet this man Boot and the little girl were both shot?”
“That’s right.”
“So you’re looking for a mysterious robed figure who shot two people with a knife?”
“Ooh me sides, I think you’ve split ’em.”
Abberline sighed. “Was the gun ever found?”
“No.”
Now the younger peeler was thinking about the gun and the puncture wound he’d found on the body.
“You only had the one witness?”
“Another one, who only saw a bloke running away.”
“Was he wearing funny robes?”
“The witness or the guy running away?”
“The guy running away.”
“No.”
“So he could be the shooter?”
Aubrey looked at him, a little shame-faced. “Well, he could be, I suppose. Never really thought about it. I had the knife-carrying figure in the robes to occupy me, didn’t I?”
Abberline threw up his hands. “Bloody hell, Aubs. Come on, sup up. You and me are going back to the Old Nichol.”
* * *
An hour later and poor old Aubrey Shaw was even more despondent. His first witness, the crone who saw the man in robes, was nowhere to be found. “She’s disappeared, just like the mythical knifeman,” Aubrey was bemoaning, although both men knew that such was the itinerant life of the slums, she’d probably just packed up and moved on.
Thank God for small mercies, then, that they were able to find the second witness. Abberline thought he might have had a broken man on his hands otherwise.
“Here she is,” said Aubrey through the side of his mouth as they approached Number Thirty-two. There on the steps of a tall, smoke-discolored and flat-fronted tenement sat a defeated woman. She gazed at them with eyes shorn of all emotion. She held a baby to one bare breast.
Aubrey coughed and looked down. Abberline desperately wanted to be worldly but failed, and he, too, felt himself coloring as he found something of great interest in a line of washing nearby. Both men did what a gentleman should do in such circumstances. They took off their hats.
“Excuse me, madam,” said Abberline. “I believe you talked to my colleague here, Police Constable Aubrey Shaw, upon the matter of something you might have seen on the night of an horrific double murder right here in The Old Nichol. Would I be correct in making such an assumption?”
“Saint preserves us.” She smiled through teeth like timeworn gravestones. “Don’t you talk pretty?”
Abberline wasn’t sure if she was taking the piss or genuinely being nice, but her face had lit a little, and her eyes softened, so he pressed home the advantage. “Madam, did you see some fellow running down this very street on the night of the murder?”
She seemed to think, looking down at the baby’s head. She adjusted the infant on her nipple then returned her attention to the two peelers on the steps below. “That I did.”
“And he was just running, was he?”
“That he was.”
“Can you describe him?”
She sniffed haughtily. “Like I told your friend there, I don’t think I could describe him, no. Not without a couple of pennies like.”
Frowning, Abberline turned to Aubrey. “You mean to tell me you could have got a description but for a few pennies?”
“It was all about the bloke with the robes, wasn’t it?” Aubrey raised his hands defensively, coloring even more than usual.
“All about you being a tight-arse, more like.”
“How was I to know you’d suddenly get all interested in some bloke running in the street. Matter of fact, why are you so bleedin’ interested? He probably just saw the blood, or better still the bloke with the knife, and thought he’d do well to make himself scarce. Wouldn’t you?”
Abberline had stopped listening. He was already climbing the steps to press coins into the woman’s palm, gallantly averting his face from her naked breast as he did so. “Now, can you tell me what he looked like?”
She looked down at her hand as though wondering whether to quibble but then decided against. “He were a bloke in a suit with a big puffy moustache like what Prince Albert used to wear before he up and died, God rest his soul. And he had big thick side-whiskers down here.”
“And tell me, madam, was he carrying anything?”
She looked shifty. Afraid.
Abberline leaned forward, still keeping his eyes primly averted but able to speak into the woman’s ear. “Was he carrying a revolver, by any chance?”
With her eyes she said yes. Abberline thanked her with his, then withdrew.
As he and Aubrey made their way out of the slum, Abberline was ebullient. “You see what this means, Aubs? It means that more than likely your running man and my corpse are the same bloke. And your man in robes is the same man who turned up at Belle Isle. This, my friend, could crack the case wide open.”
“Thank God for that.” Aubrey sighed. “Just maybe I’ll be able to restore my reputation.”
Abberline sighed. “There’s also the small matter of truth and justice, Aubrey. Let’s not forget that, eh?”
In return the older man gave him a look that told him, You may be keen but you have an awful lot to learn, and said, “Truth and justice ain’t gonna bring that little girl back, Freddie.”
* * *
Back at the station house Abberline badgered Aubrey into asking the desk sergeant for the logbook, and as Aubrey went to make what he described as a “well-earned brew,” Abberline sat it on a lectern, hoisted himself up to a tall chair, and began leafing through the heavy pages in search of persons reported missing on the night of . . .
Ah. There it was. Bloody hell. Just one person reported in this area, a man whose wife had made the report the evening after the night in question. He’d gone out to—oh, this was good—the Old Nichol, telling her he had a bit of business to attend
to, and that he’d be back soon. Only, he hadn’t turned up.
His name was Robert Waugh and he lived not far from here.
“Aubs,” said Abberline, as the other PC returned to the front desk, two steaming mugs of tea in his fists, “no time for that, we’ve got a house to visit. We’re going to the home of Robert Waugh.”
TWENTY-SIX
“Bharat Singh!”
It was late afternoon when his name came down, bouncing like a ball dropped into the shaft as it was passed from one man to another: “Bharat Singh . . . Bharat Singh . . . Bharat Singh . . .”
Though he was conditioned to respond to the name he’d been given, he was too lost in thought to respond until the man next to him, barely pausing in his work, tapped him with the head of his pickaxe. “Hey, Indian, you’re wanted up top.”
He took the ladders to find Marchant waiting for him at ground level. With him were the three punishers and together they led The Ghost across the planks, traversing a reservoir of filth to the mobile office on wheels. Inside was Cavanagh—no Mr. Pearson or Mr. Fowler today—just Cavanagh, and he sat behind a wide, polished-oak desk that was empty save for a document that The Ghost recognized at once.
Afternoon was becoming extinct, and in the dim light of the office, Cavanagh’s scar shone dully as he picked up the letter for The Ghost to see. “Your name is Bharat Singh,” he said without emotion, “originally from Bombay, author of this correspondence?”
The Metropolitan director spoke in a more confidential register than The Ghost was used to hearing from the commands he barked to Marchant and the foremen of the trench.
“Yes, I did, sir,” The Ghost acknowledged with a bow of the head.
Marchant had taken a place just behind his master, wearing the same oily smile he always wore. He stood close, as though he wished to reach out and touch Cavanagh just to draw on some of his master’s greatness. Meanwhile, behind him, the three fighters had stepped in and fanned out.
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