Blackstone and the Stage of Death (The Blackstone Detective series Book 5)

by Sally Spencer

‘I was against you doing this right from the start, even with me along to protect you,’ Jed Trent said, ‘but if you think that I’ll allow you to go on with it on your own, then you must be out of your mind.’

  ‘I’m much better on my own,’ Ellie Carr said calmly. ‘On my own, I’ve only got myself to worry about. If we go down that street together, I have you to worry about as well.’

  ‘I’m deeply touched by your worry and concern for me, Dr Carr,’ Trent said sarcastically.

  ‘And so you should be,’ Ellie Carr replied. ‘I’m almost like a mother to you, Jed.’

  ‘But though it may have escaped your attention, I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. I used to be a policeman, don’t forget — and a bloody hard one at that.’

  ‘And when you were a policeman, did you ever go down that street?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘I may have done,’ Trent replied evasively. ‘Or if not that particular one, then dozens like it.’

  ‘Did you go down it alone?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Trent said. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘No it wasn’t! It’s no more than a couple of years since you left the Force. And even if it had been a long time ago, you’d still remember — because I know you, Jed Trent, and you’ve got a memory like an elephant’s. So now, if you don’t mind, I’d like a straight answer to a straight question.’

  ‘No, I probably wouldn’t have gone down it alone,’ Trent admitted reluctantly.

  ‘Of course you wouldn’t. You’d have taken five or six of your comrades with you to back you up. But you haven’t got that back-up available now, and if some of the villains who live round here so much as catch sight of you, they’ll turn you into mince before you can say “meat grinder”.’

  ‘And what about you?’ Trent asked worriedly. ‘What do you think they’ll do to you?’

  ‘They won’t do nuffink to me, me ole cock-sparrer,’ Ellie said, slipping into her cockney accent. ‘Why would they? I’m in disguise, ain’t I?’

  And so she was, in a way. The dress and hat she was wearing were third-hand — at best — and the dirt she had smeared on her face and hands looked as if it had been there for days.

  Yet, to some extent, this was no disguise at all, she thought. She might well be Dr Eleanor Carr, who attended important medical conferences and lectured to vast halls full of eager students, but somewhere — not too far below the surface — lurked little Ellie Carr, who had been born in the slums, and, for much of her childhood, could not even have conceived of life being lived anywhere else.

  ‘I still don’t like it,’ Jed Trent said.

  ‘Let’s reach a compromise, then,’ Ellie suggested.

  ‘What kind of compromise?’

  ‘Let’s say that if I’m not back here within the hour, you’ll have my permission to call up your old mates in the Met and drench the whole area with bobbies.’

  ‘If you’re not back within the hour, I’ll call the police out whether I’ve got your permission or not,’ Jed promised her.

  * * *

  The two uniformed constables had been far from thrilled when they’d reported for duty that morning and been handed a long list of names and addresses by their sergeant.

  ‘Who are all these people, Sarge?’ Constable Baker, the more senior of the two, had asked.

  ‘They’re all the sword-makers, knife-grinders and general cutlery makers who conduct their businesses within the London area,’ the sergeant replied, with all the chirpiness of a man planning to spend his day sitting in front of the police station’s stove.

  ‘And why should they be of any interest to us?’ Constable Davenport wondered.

  ‘They’re of interest to you because they’re of interest to Inspector Blackstone, who just happens to be your superior,’ the sergeant explained. ‘The inspector would like you to visit all these establishments, and show the people in charge of them this photograph of a knife.’

  ‘But if they’re running that kind of establishment, they’ll already know what a knife looks like,’ Davenport said, then seeing the change of expression on his sergeant’s face, added a hasty, ‘Sorry, Sarge.’

  ‘And so you should be,’ the sergeant told him. ‘This particular knife was used in a sensational murder only last night, and you two have been given the honour of playing a vital part in the investigation.’

  ‘Couldn’t we play a vital part that won’t involve so much walking’?’ Baker asked hopefully.

  ‘No, you could not,’ the sergeant said. ‘This is the job that has been assigned to you, and this is the job that you’ll do. I want all the shops on this list to have been canvassed by the time you go off duty, and I don’t want to hear any excuses for you missing even a single one of them out.’

  Tan we take cabs?’ Davenport asked hopefully.

  ‘No,’ the sergeant said sternly. ‘You most certainly can not.’

  * * *

  The boy was twelve or thirteen, and said his name was Horace. He was scrawny but tough, and his deep brown eyes were ever-alert and ever-watchful. At first, Blackstone couldn’t work out why he should look so familiar. And then it came to him — the boy reminded him of his own, much younger, self.

  ‘What exactly is your job here?’ he asked.

  ‘A bit of everyfink, to be honest wiv yer,’ the boy told him.

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘A bit of paintin’, a bit of cleanin’ up, a bit of keepin’ the vermin down… ’

  Blackstone smiled. ‘Vermin?’ he said. ‘You’re not talking about the actors, are you?’

  ‘No,’ the boy said, missing the point completely. ‘We get all kinds of wild fings comes to pay us a visit. Mice as big as rats. Rats as big as cats. Cats as big as young lions. We’ve had foxes an’ hedgehogs, once or twice. The uvver night, there was even a frog in ‘ere.’

  ‘And what did you do with that? Flush it into the sewer?’

  ‘Would ‘ave done, if I could ‘ave found it. But I didn’t. I could hear the bugger croakin’, all right, but I couldn’t find neither hide nor hair of it, so I suppose it might still be here.’

  ‘Tell me about some of the other things you do,’ Blackstone suggested. ‘You sometimes run errands for the actors, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s right,’ the boy agreed, puffing out his thin chest. ‘That’s where the trainin’ comes in, you see.’

  ‘The training?’

  ‘I want to be an actor myself, one day. They have a grand life, you know. They sleep in proper feather beds. An’ they can eat three meals a day, if they feel like it. So when I’m runnin’ their errands for them, I’m watchin’ them as well. Learnin’ all the tricks of the trade, as you might say.’

  ‘You were the one who picked up the knife for Miss Devaraux last night, weren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right. Same as I’ve done every night while this partic’lar play’s been runnin’. I like doin’ fings for ‘er. She’s a nice lady, an’ sometimes she’ll give me a bit of spendin’ money out of ‘er own purse.’

  ‘Did you notice anything unusual about the knife last night?’ Blackstone wondered.

  ‘Unusual? ‘Ow do you mean?’

  ‘Well, did it feel like a different knife to the one you usually took her?’

  ‘Nah, it felt the same as always. If it ‘ad been different, I would ‘ave told Miss Devaraux.’

  ‘Then let me ask you another question. Did you see anybody in the props room who shouldn’t, by rights, have been there at all?’

  The boy grinned. ‘You mean a mysterious stranger wiv a foreign accent an’ blood drippin’ from his teeth?’ he asked.

  Blackstone returned the grin. ‘I was thinking more of any member of the cast — or any of the stage hands, for that matter — who wouldn’t normally be in that area, but put in an appearance last night.’

  ‘No,’ the boy said. ‘Everyfink was perfectly normal — right up until Mr Kirkpatrick got killed, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Blackstone
agreed. ‘Did Mr Kirkpatrick have any particular enemies that you know of?’

  ‘Well, he didn’t ‘ave a lot of friends, if that’s what you’re askin’,’ the boy said. ‘Leadin’ actors never do. But I can’t fink of anybody who’d dislike him so much as to actually go an’ kill the bleeder.’

  Especially, Blackstone thought, to go and kill the bleeder in such an elaborate manner.

  * * *

  The house she was heading for was midway down the terraced street. It looked no worse than the ones which flanked it, Ellie Carr thought — but in this street of decay and desperation, that really wasn’t saying very much.

  Ellie knocked on the door, and her knock was answered by a grotesquely fat woman with a skin which would not have looked out of place if it had been worn by a rhinoceros.

  ‘What d’yer want?’ the woman demanded, looking at Ellie as if she were something the cat had dragged in.

  ‘Do yer know Mrs Minnie Knox?’ Ellie asked.

  The fat woman scratched her armpit. ‘Yes, I know ‘er. She’s me muvver. What’s that to you?’

  ‘I’d like ter see ‘er.’

  ‘What for’?’

  ‘Cos she’s famous, ain’t she?’

  The fat woman thought about it. ‘It’ll cost yer a shillin’ to see ‘er,’ she said finally.

  ‘A shillin’!’ Ellie repeated. ‘If she was in one of them shows on the Mile End Road, it’d only cost me a penny.’

  ‘But she ain’t in one of them shows, is she’? She’s upstairs in ‘er bed. An’ if you want to see ‘er, it’ll cost yer a shillin’.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Ellie Carr agreed.

  Chapter Ten

  Police Constables Baker and Davenport had already checked out half a dozen shops on the list they’d been given by their sergeant. So far, they had met with no success at all, and their feet were beginning to complain about the punishment they were unfairly being asked to endure.

  The seventh shop on the list — Delaney and Company (established 1786) — looked to be no more promising than the previous ones had been. It was located on a narrow side-street, and though it boasted the family crests of several of its patrons over the door, it seemed highly unlikely that any member of the aristocracy had set foot in it for at least twenty years.

  The man behind the counter was in his forties. He wore a khaki smock, and the spectacles, which rested precariously on his nose, had lenses as thick as the bottoms of beer bottles.

  ‘Are you Mr Delaney?’ Constable Baker asked.

  ‘That’s me,’ the man agreed.

  ‘So, how’s business?’ Constable Davenport inquired.

  Baker scowled. He wished his partner wouldn’t always ask that question. Davenport claimed that he did it to put the person they were questioning at his ease. Maybe it did. But it also exposed them both to the danger of hearing much more on the subject than they ever needed to know.

  And so it proved to this time.

  ‘Business isn’t what it used to be at all,’ Delaney complained. ‘Seven generations of my family have been involved in this firm, but it looks like I shall be the last one to uphold the tradition.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s very interesting in its way, Mr Delaney, but —’ Constable Baker began.

  ‘In the old days, people took a real pride in their weapons,’ Delaney interrupted him. ‘Gentlemen of quality always wanted the best dress swords that money could buy them, and even a lowly cut-throat wanted to own a knife that he wouldn’t be ashamed to show to the other members of his gang. It’s not like that at all, these days. If a knife just does the job, then that’s all they care about. Why, I can remember when —’

  ‘Have you seen this knife before?’ Baker asked, slapping the photograph of the murder weapon on the counter.

  ‘Have I seen it before!’ Delaney scoffed.

  ‘Well, have you?’

  ‘I should say that I have. I made it to order. And a lovely job I did of it, too, if I say so myself as shouldn’t. And it wasn’t easy, you know.’

  ‘Why wasn’t it easy?’ Davenport wondered.

  ‘It’s never easy to make a really good knife, a knife that says immediately that craftsmanship isn’t for —’

  ‘But it was no easier, and no more difficult, than most of the knives you’ve been asked to make?’ Baker said.

  ‘It was much harder,’ Delaney said rebukingly. ‘In this case, my task was complicated by the fact that the customer demanded that the knife was a certain weight. I told him, a knife weighs what a knife weighs, and if you start messing about with that — going against the laws of nature, as you might say — you’ll probably ruin the balance. And do you know what he said to me?’

  ‘No,’ Baker asked impatiently. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He told me he didn’t care about the balance! Can you imagine that? I mean, can you?’

  ‘Never really thought much about it,’ Davenport admitted.

  ‘I make him a beautiful knife — and charge him through the nose for it — and he doesn’t give a damn about the balance!’ Delaney said, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it.

  ‘Do you happen to remember what this customer looked like?’ Constable Baker asked.

  ‘Well, of course I remember. It’s not every day somebody hands you that kind of commission. Like I told you before, all they usually care about is whether it will cut or not.’

  Baker sighed. ‘What did he look like?’ he asked.

  ‘He was a little old man.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘I couldn’t say for sure.’

  ‘Sixty? Seventy?’

  ‘Maybe. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he turned out to be even older than that.’

  * * *

  The fat woman led Ellie Carr into a corridor which was crammed with rusting prams and broken chairs, and pointed to the stairs.

  ‘Muvver’s up there,’ she said. ‘Don’t take too much time about it, or I shall ‘ave to charge you extra.’

  As if I’d stay in this place any longer than I had to, Ellie thought, placing her foot gingerly on the first of the rotting steps.

  The bedroom at the top of the stairs was as mean and dirty as the rest of the house. The bed itself looked — and smelled — as if it had last been changed when Queen Victoria came to the throne, and lying in it was a very old woman. She was almost skeletally thin and had a skin which was nearly translucent, but there was a fire in her eyes which said that though her body might be close to death, her mind was still very much alive.

  ‘There used to be ‘undreds of people ‘oo wanted to see me, just for the privilege of shakin’ me ‘and,’ the old woman said. ‘Course, that was just after the trial. I don’t get many admirers comin’ to see me these days.’

  ‘Well, yer’ve got one now,’ Ellie said. ‘Did yer do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Did you poison yer ‘usband an’ ’is fancy-woman both?’ The old woman gave a rasping laugh. ‘The jury found me not guilty, didn’t they?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, they were bound to, weren’t they? I mean to say, when one of ‘em dropped dead in the street on the way to the court, it was only natural for the rest of ‘em to wonder ‘oo was goin’ to be next.’

  ‘That was an ‘eart attack wot that juror ‘oo yer talkin’ about died of,’ the old woman said.

  ‘It was poison, an’ everybody at the time knew it,’ Ellie contradicted her. ‘The bobbies couldn’t prove ‘e’d been poisoned — an’ even if they could ‘ave, they’d never have bin able to pin it on you, what wiv you bein’ locked up inside the prison an’ everyfink — but every member of that jury knew that if ‘e voted to convict you, ‘e might be the next one to feel a sudden sharp pain in ‘is chest.’

  The old woman cackled. ‘The judge was bloody furious wiv that jury,’ she said. ‘Told ‘em there was enough evidence to ‘ang me three times over, an’ it was a disgrace that they’d found me not guilty. But for all ‘is shoutin’ an’ screamin’, there was n
uffink he could do about it, was there? They’d reached their verdict, an’ ’ad to let me go.’

  ‘An’ you were more careful after that, wasn’t you’? There was never enough evidence to arrest you a second time.’

  The old woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘Maybe that’s ‘cos I didn’t do no more poisonin’s,’ she said.

  Ellie put her hand on her hips. ‘Pull the uvver one,’ she said. ‘It’s got bells on.’

  ‘But if I ‘ad ‘ave done any more poisonin’s, it would only ‘ave been ‘cos I ‘ad no choice,’ Minnie Knox said. ‘After all, I was a poor widder woman after me ‘usband got taken. I ‘ad to do somefink to earn a crust, didn’t I’?’

  Ellie reached into her purse and produced a gold guinea. She held it up for the old woman to see.

  ‘Speakin’ of earnin’ a crust,’ she said, ‘I need some advice — an’ I’m willin’ to pay for it.’

  Minnie Knox’s eyes clouded over with dark suspicion. ‘I’ve retired,’ she said.

  ‘Well, now, that is a real pity,’ Ellie replied, putting the money back in her purse.

  “Ow do I know yer not workin’ for the police?’ the old woman asked, her eyes following the progress of the coin with longing. “Ow do I know yer not just tryin’ to trap me?’

  ‘It’s thirty years since you was arrested,’ Ellie said. ‘All the policemen involved in the case will be dead by now, an’ them that ‘as replaced them ain’t interested in you no more.’

  ‘Yer prob’ly right. It’s a terrible fang to be forgotten,’ the old woman said wistfully.

  ‘But since you are, an’ since — as far as the bobbies are concerned — yer’ve got away wiv it, will yer ‘elp me now?’ Ellie said.

  ‘If I tell yer ‘ow to kill somebody, I’ll be just as guilty as what you are yourself.’

  ‘I don’t want yer to tell me ‘ow to kill somebody,’ Ellie explained. ‘I want yer to tell me ‘ow somebody was killed.’

  ‘Now why would yer want to know that?’

  They’d reached a point at which it was time to stop playing games, Ellie decided. ‘I’m a criminal pathologist,’ she said in her normal voice.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s a special kind of doctor. I cut people open to find out exactly how they died.’