by BK Duncan
May agreed that it did and said goodbye before putting the receiver down as if it were the carrier of an infectious disease. She’d pop into the undertaker’s on the way to the newspaper office but first she had to tell the caretaker to expect Mr Chivers’ van, and get the forms ready to accompany the bodies. With any luck she could get it all done and still have time to fit in a nap before getting ready to babysit Jack.
Chapter Forty-Five
She met him at the appointed time outside the gates of the paperboard mills alongside the locks between Regent’s Canal Dock and the river. They had to wait for a bridger - the opening of the swing bridge to let a large coal barge through - before continuing down the Ratcliffe stretch of Narrow Street. They passed a series of ship’s chandlers, their open doorways passages for the warm smells of tarred ropes, varnish, lamp oil, and freshly-sanded wooden blocks. To their left the incoming tide lapped against the wharves - Duke Shore, Chinnock’s, Broadway, Victoria - and moored lighters bumped against creaking jetties. Grey-boarded warehouses loomed like substantial ghosts, their wooden balconies beckoning fingers to the night.
They turned into Horseferry Road to meet with what seemed like every soul inhabiting this area of Limehouse. Laughter and singing accompanied by pianos, tuned by the fog and damp, from the full pubs - the White Swan, King’s Arms, Angel and Trumpet - formed a backdrop against which men leaned on walls, and women with a bag or basket full of shopping from the evening Butchers Row market hooked over sturdy arms, latchkeys dangling from forefingers. The thin light from the gas jets played with their shapes and shadows. They passed a fried fish bar, its steamy windows covered with Scandinavian phrases, then a Japanese tattoo parlour. On the corner with Medland Street stood a boarding house for Norwegian sailors, a stuffed sea-parrot in one of its big square windows, an arrangement of shells, seaweed, and dried fish half-filling the other. The gambling den was next door, the buff rendering of the boxy building giving false expectations of a Quaker Meeting House or Baptist Mission.
‘What are you hoping to learn from tonight?’
‘Not much. I really only wanted to put in an appearance to see if the Tong leader does. This isn’t the den I normally stake out - that one’s higher class and caters for rich whites like I said - but I’ve never been altogether sure how this one fits in. I reckon it could be simply that it’s more legitimate, as in straightforward gambling instead of games designed to end in losing an inheritance, and the Tong leader’s presence would confirm that: he’s never in attendance at the other sort. I suspect it’s so as his tricksy lawyers won’t have to lie too much if the legitimacy of any of his newly-acquired holdings is challenged in court.’
‘So we just blend in and wait for the great man to arrive?’
‘Or spot any evidence he’s here already. Failing that, any connection will do. If, when I go back to the other place I see any of the same closed faces dealing cards at the ends of the tables, then I’ll have established a link. It might help, I don’t know, but it’ll certainly give credibility to my line that these gambling dens are part of a sophisticated network and not just lone enterprises.’
Jack twisted the handle and they went in. The hallway was flanked by two open doors and finished by a tight dog-leg staircase. May allowed herself to be led into the left-hand room. It was full of men - she assumed the segregated women were playing pak-a-poo in the other. The oblong dark-wood tables were topped with bone dice and matching shaking cups; discarded hands of cards; and blue, green, and red inscribed ivory mahjong tiles. Glasses slicked with oily spirits and bottles of beer sat close to the elbows of the focused gamblers. A Chinaman in a bowler hat swept them into two empty places before asking ‘what is your delight?’ May deferred to Jack in this also.
‘Beer.’ As the man walked away, Jack turned to May. ‘Less easy to adulterate.’
None of the gamblers at the table seemed to have noticed their arrival but when the next hand of grubby pasteboards was dealt they were included in the round. May had never played cards in her life. A dense layer of blue-grey smoke - by the now familiar smell some of it opium-laced - hovered at table height like a strata of seawater in a river mouth and made it hard for her to distinguish the suits. There were no numbers. And no one was placing any bets.
‘Abacus,’ Jack said under the cover of a cough.
The dealer clicked four red beads to the right of an intricately carved ebony frame.
‘Tallies losses.’
Now she understood: by the expediency of not demanding money up-front on the table, the gamblers were lured into underestimating the amount of debt they were accruing. The alcohol (drug-spiked or not) would eventually make them forget it completely. She lowered her hand a little so Jack could see her cards. He banged his knee against hers. Then again. She laid the two.
‘Will I win?’ She’d spoken down into her lap; their companions looked to be foreign sailors so fresh-in they didn’t understand English, but she couldn’t be sure.
Jack didn’t respond until a flurry of curses from the next table provided him with cover.
‘No, you’ll lose, but someone else will lose more at the end of the game; they’re out to catch them, not the table decoration.’
May was about to bite until she remembered her disguise: Jack hadn’t been commenting on her gender. The hand concluded and the dealer clicked over his abacus. Then he slid another round onto the table. The other players grabbed the cards like drowning men. May was reluctant to look at what luck - or sleight of hand - had given her in case she stood a chance of winning; she didn’t want to be fingered as the next recipient of red beads.
They played a further four hands, and drank another bottle of beer each. The smoke was stinging May’s eyes. She removed her scarf (which she’d dirtied with soot from the range to fit more into character) to wipe away the tears. Sly glances noted the scar. The man to the right of her shifted his chair an inch or two away. The sense of power she felt from his assumption about her propensity for violence was thrilling. A movement at the back of the room caught her attention. Someone had slipped out from behind the bamboo curtain. Someone who looked to be as out of place here as she and Jack would’ve been in civilian clothes. May thought it could’ve been Richard Weatherby although it could equally have been a thinner man in a bulky overcoat. A hat brim shielding his face, he was almost in as much disguise as they were. He hugged the walls on his way to exiting through the door.
May leant in towards Jack. ‘Follow him.’
‘Who?’
‘The man who just left.’
Jack continued dithering over which card to select. May suspected the bug was biting and he was beginning to hate the thought of being branded a perpetual loser.
‘It could’ve been the Tong leader for all you know.’ May doubted it but she had to get Jack out of his chair somehow. ‘Come on.’ She virtually dragged him up by his sleeve.
The man was loitering in the light from the windows of the Norwegian boarding house, seemingly searching his pockets for matches to light the cigarette nestling in his pursed lips.
‘Go on. Speak to him. I obviously can’t in case I blow my cover.’
‘What about mine?’
‘For God’s sake, Jack, I’d make a better reporter than you with one hand tied behind my back. Stick to the sailor routine and make out you lost big in there or something. Ask him if he thinks the tables are rigged; I don’t know, use what passes for your wits.’
Jack lurched forward at her push. May nipped around the corner back into Horseferry Road. Things were quieter here now. An exchange... the sound of a match rasping on brickwork... a faint whiff of sulphur, and cigarette smoke from refined tobacco... more words banded. The voices moved out of range. Should she go back into Medland Street and follow in case Jack was on to something and wanted to keep his quarry company to wherever he was going? Opting for the safety of concealm
ent, May paced in front of the Japanese tattoo parlour in a steady rhythm. She had no idea how long they’d been in the gambling den but drunks were reeling out of pub doors to the accompaniment of haven’t you got a missus to go home to? by the time Jack came sauntering up. He was laughing.
‘Gave me a ticket, of all things,’ he held up a thin strip of card. ‘Obviously there’s more to him that just good looks because he was concluding his business of lining the Tong leader’s pockets - although, of course, he didn’t actually say that in so many words.’
May’s frustration reached such a crescendo that she started to pound her fists against his chest. He took her wrists in his hands, still with that simpleton’s grin on his face.
‘Protection racket, ever heard of it? According to this, your man there is putting on a show at the Gaiety tomorrow.’
Horatio Barley-Freeman. May hadn’t been expecting that at all.
‘Well, from my own vast store of knowledge I can tell you that the Tong regard all forms of entertainment as their exclusive preserve and demand a little inducement not to have an impromptu Chinese riot or some such to scare the queues away.’
‘Why didn’t tell you tell me they didn’t limit themselves to drugs and gambling earlier?’
‘You didn’t ask. Anyway, I thought it was common knowledge. If you’d wanted to be let in on it then you only need ask the stage doorman or the scenery shifters or even the manager. Hell, May, I bet even your little Alice knows how things are organised by now.’
A shudder rattled May’s shoulder joints at the thought Alice might’ve been approached in the box office by a member of the Tong. But the connection with the Gaiety wasn’t the thing she was most interested in. The protection rackets. If Miles was smuggling drugs onto Anchor Wharf and the Tong hadn’t been the paymasters at all but shielding the operation in return for a cut from both sides. And Miles for some reason decided to stop paying. Here was a solid motive even the most obtuse member of one of Colonel Tindal’s juries could understand. Because the docks were run on interlocking waves of protection: the gangers who selected which of the lump would be offered a few hours casual work; the old soaks in the pubs who let slip the word of a job going for a little consideration in their back pockets; the ship owners who paid for the privilege of tying their ships on the open water side of another in order to have their cargo discharged through already customs-cleared holds. According to wharfingers like Alexander Laker, the Trades Unions themselves were nothing more than heavyweight protection mobs. Jack had let her arms fall and was scuffing a toe against the bottom of the wall.
‘Come on, there’ll be no more action tonight. At least you got something out of it, so let’s seal your good fortune with a drink. One of the hostelries along here suit you? In that get-up you’ll look perfectly at home in any of them.’
May shook her head. ‘Feel free to indulge on my behalf but I think it’s time I headed back. Work in the morning. You can buy me one another time for smoothing your way in and playing my part so deftly. See you around.’
Chapter Forty-Six
Vi wanted to pull her hair out - or someone else’s. The show was in six hours’ time, and there were more last minute hitches than it would take the England cricket team to field. The flyman had gone down with influenza and his replacement couldn’t seem to distinguish one backcloth from another, despite the fact that was all he had to do; the small bridge they’d decided at yesterday’s rehearsal the comedy duo could do their patter atop had collapsed the moment the fatter had stepped on it; the mother of one of the acrobats was lecturing the rest of the troupe in Japanese that he had a sore foot and mustn’t somersault - Vi had heard the English version. Twice. And, as if the onstage problems weren’t enough, Mr Dansi’s poodles had all acquired upset stomachs and befouled the entire dressing room.
The only bright thing about the morning so far was that Horatio was on sparkling form, conducting the lighting boys on their changeovers by using a rolled-up newspaper as a baton.
‘Right, I shall now leave all in your capable hands and go and make sure the old crone in the box office knows to get the stalls sold before offering tickets to the gallery. They cost more but we’re going to be throwing in a small bottle of linctus as an inducement. Not that I think we’ll have any problems filling both after the last-minute build-up I’ve given us.’
He poked Vi in the ribs with the newspaper.
‘Take a look when you’ve got a moment. Hot off the press. Collected it myself. Page eight. Have you heard anything from Alice, by the way?’
‘Why should I have done? She’s not been due to work the box office this week, and if she’s not in the theatre then I wouldn’t know where she was.’
‘I still feel badly about what happened.’
‘Well, don’t. If she hasn’t got over it by now then it’s her look out. Such a childish girl isn’t worth worrying about.’ Vi took the newspaper and laid it on the tip-up beside her. ‘Go and do your promotion and leave me in peace to iron this lot out.’
It took half an hour to dispel the chaos on stage sufficiently to be able to get on with sorting Ethel. She was a good little male impersonator - although, of course, no Vesta Tilley - with the right amount of swagger, and she looked cutely convincing in her dapper suit. But she just couldn’t seem to get the hang of not rushing the last chorus. After they’d been through the song for the third time, Vi made the decision on Horatio’s behalf to ask the band director to provide the minimum of accompaniment and hoped that would do the trick.
Vi told everyone onstage to take a ten minute break and collapsed gratefully into the front row of the stalls. She picked up the copy of the East End News and flicked to the entertainment section. It was a full-page splash, laid out like a theatre bill but with no names to go with the description of each act. Except when it came to who was appearing as the magician. She smiled at the man’s blatant vanity but couldn’t help being a little miffed that as the only professional (and understudy director to boot) she hadn’t warranted a mention. When they did the publicity for Glasgow she’d make sure her name was just underneath his. Or maybe, even better: Barley-Freeman and his lovely wife, Violet Mary.
Ethel very sweetly came over and asked if she’d like some coffee from the shop across the road. Vi could’ve kissed her. Deciding to wait until she’d been suitably restored before attempting to hammer the importance of the mystical art of timing into the not-so-comic duo, Vi glanced at the front page of the newspaper in the hope of a little light relief. The headline wasn’t exactly what she’d been hoping for: Explosives Cache Found in Abandoned Dockside Warehouse. She wondered uncharitably if she could ask for the loan of some to blow up the vent’s dummy. She idly scanned the columns that stretched below a photograph of Lloyd George. It was a something and nothing story full of speculation about a possible Sinn Féin bombing campaign and making references to the recent disturbances in Liverpool and Manchester, followed by a précis of the debates during the Second Reading of the Government of Ireland Bill. It was pretty dry stuff. Until she came to the last paragraph:
The Poplar Coroner’s Officer, Miss May Keaps, has let this paper know she is regarding this find as connected to an ongoing inquest. In her opinion it will be instrumental in the jury being able to reach a verdict as to the cause and manner of Miles Elliott’s death, whose body was found in Limehouse Causeway almost exactly four weeks ago.
Vi had liked May very much when she’d met her but was at a loss to understand how she could do such an unfeminine and distasteful job. It wasn’t surprising that she hadn’t got herself a man. With the hindsight of her new-found security, she smiled at how foolish she’d been to imagine Horatio could find a woman who acted like a man in a skirt attractive.
The object of her thoughts arrived carrying a mug of coffee, Ethel following on juggling her own and a tray of buns. Vi made a point of thanking the woman - she wouldn’t pu
t it past Horatio to have taken the credit for himself otherwise. The two of them sat side by side companionably sharing their elevenses.
‘So, what did you think of my effort?’
‘Well, you certainly didn’t sell yourself short. No, I’m teasing; it had just the right flavour: it’ll ginger up those who are already intending to come so they’ll be busting with excitement the minute they join the queue, and convince anyone who was in two minds about shelling out for a ticket. I take it you saw this?’ She put her mug on the floor and unfolded the newspaper. ‘No wonder you’re full of the joys of spring.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You must be pleased the Miles Elliott inquest is going to be brought to a close.’
‘Why should I be? It’s got nothing to do with me. Right, let’s crack on. Which rough diamonds have you left to polish?’
‘Laughing boys over there, obviously; the vent; and the acrobats need tightening up.’
‘See if Mr Dansi’s around as well, will you? The manager’s chewed my ear once too often about the stink backstage. And, Vi, thanks for all this; I really appreciate it.’
He stroked her cheek with his fingertip before vaulting over the rail into the band pit.
‘Where will you be?’
‘Down in the bowels seeing if I can’t find some embellishments for the front of my cabinet. The scenery boys managed to knock up something pretty good from the stuff you unearthed, but I’ve a fancy it would look less like a last-minute replacement if it had some cut-out lightening flashes on the sides.’
Vi leapt up, kicking over the dregs of her coffee.
‘Horatio, you’ll be missing for hours if you go down there. The show’s at four o’clock, remember?’
‘It’s okay.’ His voice was muffled by the stage above his head. ‘Won’t be long.’
‘I’ll come with you; I know where to look.’