Hanging nearby was a photograph of Mrs. Waugh with the man whose body Abberline had lost. They were in the right place. Abberline nudged Aubrey in the ribs and gave him the nod.
“Madam,” he began, trying again, with what he hoped was a little more composure this time. “A man matching your husband’s description was seen in the vicinity of the Old Nichol at the scene of a . . .”
“Well, he was on his way to the Old Nichol the night he went missing, so that’s about right,” she said, continuing to work at the dough with the rolling pin.
This was the new middle class, mused Abberline. They ate just as well as the highborns but did it all themselves. Something occurred to him.
“What trade was your husband in?” he asked.
“He was a photographer,” she replied, in a tone of voice that left them in no doubt what she thought of that particular profession.
“A photographer, eh?” said Abberline. “And what business does a photographer have in the Old Nichol, then?”
Still pounding, she fixed Abberline with a contemptuous look. “Are you having me on? How am I supposed to bleeding know what business he has in the Old Nichol at any sort of hour? He don’t tell me what he’s doing, and to be quite frank with you, I don’t bother asking.”
There was something about her protestations that were a little too theatrical for Abberline’s liking, but he put that to one side for a second.
“Aren’t you worried about your husband, Mrs. Waugh?”
She shrugged. “Not especially. How would you feel if your wife went and made herself scarce, you’d probably throw a party, wouldn’t you?”
“I’m not married.”
“Well, come back to me when you are and we’ll have this talk again.”
“All right, then. If you’re not worried about him, then how come you reported him missing?”
Indignation made Mrs. Waugh’s voice rise, and she was already fairly indignant. “Because who’s going to pay for all this if he’s bleedin’ missing?”
“My point being, Mrs. Waugh, that the Old Nichol is a dangerous place at the best of times and perhaps not somewhere that a respectable photographer like your husband might want to visit.”
“Well,” she snapped back, “perhaps that’s why he took his pistol.”
Abberline and Aubrey shared a look, barely able to believe their ears.
“He took his gun, did he?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Yes, except, Mrs. Waugh, the man matching your husband’s description who was seen in the vicinity of the Old Nichol may or may not have been involved in a shooting.”
Now at last she set down the rolling pin. “I see,” she said gravely.
“It would be a great help to us if you could tell us what your husband might have been doing in the Old Nichol. What was the purpose of his visit? Was he there to meet somebody for example. Apart from his pistol did he take anything with him? Did he tell you what time to expect him back?”
She had ignored all the questions. Pinning Abberline with her gaze, she said, “This shooting that occurred. Was anybody hurt?”
“There were two confirmed fatalities, Mrs. Waugh. A little girl . . .” He watched as the woman winced, closing her eyes, absorbing the pain. “. . . and a street thug who went by the name of Boot.”
She opened her eyes again. “Boot? Robert was on his way to meet Boot. As far as I know, Boot was a business associate.”
“I’m sorry, I thought you just said he never told you about his business and you never asked?”
“Well, I picked up the odd thing, didn’t I? Any road up, he was on his way there for some kind of deal . . .”
“A deal?”
Her eyes darted. She had already said too much. “Yes, well, he’s a photographer, he . . .”
“. . . takes pictures. That’s what photographers do. Photographers take pictures of men and their wives and the children of men and their wives. Big bustles, buffed-up boots, buttoned-up jackets and uncomfortably starched collars, grim and forbidding looks into the camera, all that kind of thing. That’s what photographers do. They don’t do deals in slums with street thugs after dark.”
“Wait a second, you haven’t said yet—if there were two confirmed deaths, does that mean Robert’s still alive?”
Again, Abberline and Aubrey shared a look. “I’m afraid our most likely theory at the moment is that your husband might have been killed by a second assailant. In fact, I was wondering if you have a photograph of him, so that I can confirm if his body was found at the Metropolitan Line dig in the north.”
His asking was a formality so he could break the news, but it was at the mention of the Metropolitan Line that a dark look passed across her face. “Oh, lummy,” she said, shaking her head with the terrible inevitability of it all, “I always said he was getting in too deep there. I always knew he was playing with fire.”
Trying to contain his excitement, and as far as police constable Aubrey Shaw was concerned, not succeeding in the slightest, Abberline leapt on her words. “What do you mean ‘too deep’? Tell me exactly what you know, Mrs. Waugh . . .”
The Waughs’ kitchen window was tall and as black as night, like a stained-glass window without the stained glass. As Mrs. Waugh looked at him, about to speak, something there caught Abberline’s eye.
A second later, the window exploded.
TWENTY-NINE
A split second of indecision before The Ghost decided he couldn’t have the blood of two innocent peelers on his hands, and he made his move.
In the end he gambled on two things: his own marksmanship, and that Mrs. Waugh would make enough noise to wake the dead.
He was not disappointed in either respect.
Two objectives: to save the peelers and to prevent them from seeing either him, Marchant or Hardy. He cast around for a stone, found a large pebble fringing a flowerbed nearby and slipped it into his palm, then, as he saw Hardy tense and the silver blade rise in the doorway, he made his move.
The Ghost wore only rags and had nothing to protect him from the glass, so when he hit the window full force he felt what seemed like a thousand knife cuts as he crashed through glass and splintered wood and to a crockery table on the other side.
A single lamp hung from the ceiling as the only light source in the room, and The Ghost let fly with his pebble at the same time as he crashed through the window. His aim was true and the light blinked out and night fell like swift death in the room at exactly the same time as a shout went up and Mrs. Waugh started screaming.
Dislodged crockery fell and smashed and added to the din but The Ghost was already on the move, and he propelled himself to a draining board, going round Mrs. Waugh to the peelers by traversing the room without touching the floor, like the games children play—like a game he himself had played at home in Amritsar. Another jump from the draining board took him to the peelers, neither of whom saw or heard him or had time to react, as he landed on the tiles just in front of them, and delivered two quick throat punches, felling first Abberline, then his companion, all done in a matter of a half a second, and all done to the accompaniment of screams from Mrs. Waugh.
It was over in a trice. Nobody but The Ghost knew what was happening and that suited the young man fine. Confusion was his friend.
“Grab her,” he commanded. Hardy and Marchant had come barging into the room and The Ghost saw the fury of denial on Hardy’s face. “Grab her before her screams bring other bobbies running.”
Then Marchant was barking orders like he was a man in charge and not a man who was hopelessly confused about a situation that had spun irretrievably out of his control. “You heard him. Grab her! Blooming well shut her up!” And perhaps grateful for the chance to carry out a little violence, Hardy strode across the room to where Mrs. Waugh stood screaming, and The Ghost saw the flash of brass knuckle
s and he turned his head away as Mrs. Waugh’s screams abruptly stopped.
It took all three of them to carry her out of the house and bundle her in the Clarence. The Ghost made sure he was last to leave and closed the front door behind him.
In the house an icy wind blew through the smashed window of the kitchen. On the floor the two peelers lay out cold.
THIRTY
It was a day of recrimination.
The name Bharat Singh came bouncing down the shaft and into the tunnel, and The Ghost once again scaled the ladders and made his way across the planks to the office. There sat Cavanagh, just as he had the day before, and there stood Marchant, Hardy, Smith and Other Hardy, just as they had the day before.
Only things were different now. Where yesterday Hardy had looked at The Ghost with curiosity at best, now he gazed at him with unmasked hatred; Marchant, too, saw him with new interest.
“I have some important news for you, young Bharat,” said Cavanagh with hooded eyes. “You are to be promoted. No more working in the tunnel. No more laboring in the trench. From now on you will work under Marchant here, putting your reading and writing skills to good use. Congratulations, you have achieved everything your father would have wanted.”
It was a fictional father’s admiration that Cavanagh mocked, but that didn’t stop The Ghost’s feeling a twinge of something approaching pure hatred for him.
“You may ask why,” continued Cavanagh. “Why have you been promoted? It appears from talking to Mrs. Waugh that everything you told us was correct. As I’m sure you are already aware, Mr. Smith here recovered a photographic plate from your hole at the Thames Tunnel. Therefore your first task is to carry out the sentence of death on the treacherous Mr. Waugh. Only, of course that sentence has been carried out, and you have proven yourself in my eyes.”
The Ghost nodded. “Thank you, sir. What of my victim’s widow?”
“She’s been taken care of.”
The Ghost kept his face blank but chalked up one more innocent.
Meanwhile, from behind him, Hardy cleared his throat.
Cavanagh acknowledged him, turning his attention to The Ghost. “Mr. Hardy here feels aggrieved about your actions last night. Neither seem quite sure what happened”—at this he looked hard at Marchant then at Hardy—“but both are agreed that you acted impulsively and put them at risk.”
The Ghost opened his mouth about to defend himself.
“But . . .” Cavanagh held out a hand to stop him. “I happen to disagree with Mr. Marchant and Mr. Hardy. We had a body discovered at the dig, which raises questions. The last thing we need is two dead constables as well. There are only a certain number of questions we can withstand. You, Mr. Hardy, should know better.”
“That’s as may be,” growled Hardy, “but the lad went rogue. It was agreed that Mr. Marchant and me would take the kitchen and he would stop somebody leaving from the rear. He smashed through a bloody window, guv. It wasn’t exactly stealthy, know what I mean?”
Cavanagh gave a thin smile. “Something tells me our newest employee knew exactly what he was doing.”
THIRTY-ONE
Abberline and Aubrey had pulled themselves from the floor of the Waughs’ kitchen, made their way back to the station house with pounding heads and their tails tucked firmly between their legs then bedded down for the night.
Bedraggled, pained and still exhausted, they found themselves at the front desk not long after dawn, when the alarm was raised. A woman had rushed in screaming about a suicide.
“Where?” Abberline asked.
“House on Bedford Square . . .” the woman gasped.
They’d looked at one another, a mirror image of slack-jawed shock, then both bolted for the door.
* * *
Less than half an hour later, they were back in the very same kitchen they’d left in the early hours. When they left it was dark, with a wind gusting through the smashed window, the terra-cotta tiles crunchy with broken glass, and a dropped rolling pin on the floor.
Now, though, it was light, and everything was just as it had been the previous night with the exception of one thing: Mrs. Waugh had returned. She was hanging from the ceiling lamp, a noose fashioned from linen tight around her neck, head lolling, tongue protruding from blue lips and a puddle of urine on the tiles beneath her dangling boots.
Nobody likes to see a dead body before their elevenses, thought Abberline, and he turned on his heel and marched out.
* * *
“They piss themselves, you know!”
Cavanagh, Marchant, the punishers and The Ghost were still in the office when Abberline and Aubrey announced their presence with a loud, not-to-be-denied, we-are-the-peelers knock, clomped inside and started talking about people pissing themselves.
Aubrey was as red-faced as ever, but anger had given Abberline an expression to match, and he glowered from man to man, his eyes alighting finally on The Ghost. “You,” he snapped, “where did you get those cuts?”
“Mr. Singh is a laborer, Constable,” broke in Cavanagh, before The Ghost could answer, “and I’m afraid his English isn’t very good, but he suffered an accident in the trench last night.”
Cavanagh made no effort to be charming or ingratiating with Abberline. He simply stated facts. At the same time he indicated to Other Mr. Hardy, who turned to leave.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Abberline barked, wheeling on Other Mr. Hardy.
“He’s going where I say he goes, or where he likes, or maybe even your own station house, should he so desire to speak to a sergeant there . . . Unless of course you plan to place him under arrest, in which case, I’m sure we’re all interested to hear on what charge, and what compelling evidence you have to support it?”
Abberline spluttered, lost for words. He hadn’t been sure how this would go, but one thing was for sure, he didn’t picture its going like this.
“Now, you were saying, about people pissing themselves?” said Cavanagh drily. “Which people would this be, exactly?”
“Those who find themselves at the end of a noose,” spat Abberline.
“Suicides?”
“Not just toppers, no, but murders too. Anywhere you find a poor soul at the end of a noose you find some effluent not far away. The bowels open, you see.” He paused for effect. “Lucky for Mrs. Waugh that she didn’t need number twos.”
His gaze went around the room: unreadable Cavanagh, sly Marchant, the three punishers seemingly having the time of their lives, and . . . the Indian.
Abberline’s gaze lingered on the Indian the longest, and he could swear he saw something there, a flicker of emotion, and not an emotion out of the gutter, either, but a proper one. The kind that Aubrey was always saying he himself could do with learning.
Abberline removed his eyes slowly from the Indian, taking them instead to the big guy, the punisher with the gold tooth.
“You,” he said, “it was you, wasn’t it? You was at the house.”
The guy, “Mr. Hardy” if Abberline remembered correctly, displayed his golden dentistry as well as some other splendid specimens. “No, I was here all night, Mr. Blue Bottle, as Mr. Cavanagh will confirm.”
“You just blooming watch yer sauce-box, you . . .” said Abberline, pointing at Hardy
“Yes, Mr. Hardy”—Cavanagh sighed—“perhaps it might be wise not to excite our visitor here any more than he is already excited. And as for you, Constable, may I reiterate that Mr. Singh, Mr. Hardy, Marchant, Smith and Other Mr. Hardy were all with me last night and, ah . . . Abberline, it appears you have a visitor.”
“Abberline,” the constable heard from behind him, and cringed at the distinctive sound of his sergeant’s voice. “Just what the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at?”
THIRTY-TWO
Furious, Abberline stepped out into the noise and drive of the tunnel works, with
Aubrey at his heels, struggling to keep up.
“Hold up, hold up, where are you bleedin’ going?” yelled his red-faced companion over the never-ending din of machinery.
“Back to City Road is where I’m bleeding going,” Abberline roared back over his shoulder. He reached the wooden gate at the perimeter of the site, yanked it open and brushed past a sleepy worker whose job it was to keep the riffraff out. “This lot are into it right up to their eyeballs. They stink of it, I’m telling you.”
Outside in the street they weaved their way through the human detritus that were either attracted by commercial possibilities of the dig—traders, hawkers, prostitutes, pickpockets—or genuinely had business in that part of town, and began the short hike back to the home of the unfortunate Mr. and Mrs. Waugh.
“What do you think it is they’re up to their necks in?” Aubrey held on to his hat as he tried to keep up with Abberline.
“I don’t know that, do I? If I knew that, then life would be a lot bloody simpler, wouldn’t it?” He stopped, turned and raised a finger like an admonishing schoolmaster. “But I tell you this, Aubrey Shaw. They’re up to something.” He shook the selfsame finger in the direction of the fenced-off rail works. “And whatever it is they’re up to, it’s no good. You hear me?” He returned to his marching. “I mean, did you see them all, stood there, guilty as you like? That young fella, the Indian bloke, had blood all over him. Accident in the tunnel my fat arse. He got all cut up when he came through Mrs. Waugh’s window.”
“You think that was him?”
“Of course I think it was him,” exploded Abberline. “I know it was him. I know it was him. They know it was him. Even you know it was him. Proving it is the bloody problem, but it was him all right. He came through the window, knocked out the light then knocked us out.”
By now Aubrey had drawn level, speaking through gulps as he tried to catch his breath. “Do you realize what you’ve just said, Freddie? I mean, isn’t that where this theory of yours falls down? Because there ain’t no way he could have done all that. He’d have to be some kind of acrobat or something.”
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