The strange affair of Spring-heeled Jack bas-1

by Mark Hodder

  Well done, Algy! thought Burton, pleased that his friend was steering the conversation back in the right direction. He remembered Monty doing the same, under very similar circumstances, not much less than twenty-four hours ago. Repetitive themes, just as Countess Sabina had suggested, as if time were music, presenting the same refrain.

  Listen to the echoes, Captain; the points of time's rhythm, for each is a crossroads.

  "Blooming heck, you can knock 'em back!" observed Robinson, noting that Swinburne's brandy glass and tankard were both empty again.

  "Another round, if you please!" requested the little poet. "Include your good self."

  "Ta very much. Edward Oxford? He was barmy. Talked to himself all the time. The customers treated him like the village idiot. Laughed at him. Teased him. Mighty popular with the Brigade, though, he was; always asking after their families, befriending their kids; and he was a blooming good barman, too. Fast on his feet with a good head for figures. Never once gave the wrong change. Kept the taps clean and the ale flowing. I ask you, gentshow was I to know he was a killer?"

  Burton said solemnly, "You can never tell what's at the back of a man's mind."

  "True!" snapped Punchinello. "If I'd known, I'd have killed the sod."

  They all grunted in agreement.

  Burton surreptitiously checked his pocket watch. It was twenty minutes past midnight.

  "So the Libertines frequented the Hog in the Pound just because Oxford had worked there?" he asked.

  "Exactly so," said Robinson, serving the fresh drinks. "And I can tell you, at first it was only the fact that they dressed like gentlemen that stopped me booting them out!"

  "That and the money they spent," snorted Punchinello.

  Swinburne looked at the oldster at his side. "So you were one of the Battersea Brigade?"

  "I was. And I nearly came to blows with that Beresford bastard."

  "How come?"

  "You've read the evening paper? About the attack? This morning? The girl? Spring Heeled Jack?"

  Sir Richard Francis Burton tensed and placed his tankard back on the bar in case they noticed his shaking hand.

  "Yes," said Swinburne. "It was fairly vague. The girl hallucinated, surely. Spring Heeled Jack is just a bogeyman."

  "Nope. That devil's real, right enough. Ain't that so, Bob?"

  The old barman nodded. "Aye. Attacked a couple of our girls, he did."

  "Your girls?" asked Burton.

  "The Brigade's. Bartholomew Stevens's lass and Dave Alsop's."

  Burton's eyebrows rose. Stevens! Alsop!

  "The attacks happened around the time Dave moved up to a little place north of the city, on account of getting work as a blacksmith," explained Robinson. "But though he was well away from the power station, he still used to ride down to the Hog occasionally for a drink with the old mob."

  "Nice chap, he was," muttered Punchinello.

  "Aye, it's true. Then that devil had a go at his daughter right on the doorstep of his blooming house. That was in '38, just a few months after Jumping Jack had attacked Bart Stevens's girl."

  "What happened there?" asked Burton.

  "Mary, her name was; she was set upon not far from here but screamed loudly enough to attract help and the devil hopped it. Well, a few years passed, then we had the assassination and old Beresford, the Mad Marquess, started bringing his chaps to the Hog. After a while, a rumour went round that he was Spring Heeled Jack. Dave and Bart got wind of it and they, and Ted here, were all set to beat the living daylights out of him, ain't that right, Ted?"

  "Yup. We was going to pulverise the bastard."

  "But I stopped the blooming hotheads!" said Robinson. "I was all for giving Spring Heeled Jack a good hammering but I didn't want no trouble in my pub unless it was for good reason, so I told old Bart to bring along young Mary to have a look at Beresford, see if she recognised him."

  "And she didn't?"

  "Nope," confirmed Robinson. "She'd never seen him before. Said he was nothing like the devil who attacked her. Jack had a thin face; Beresford was a moonfaced git."

  "So no duffing up of the Mad Marquess," said Punchinello, regretfully.

  "What happened to the Battersea Brigade?" asked the king's agent.

  "Hah!" snorted Punchinello. "Turned into a drinking club. Never did a single thing. No opposition to the power station!"

  "By the midforties, most had drifted away," put in Robinson.

  "To where?" asked Swinburne.

  "Well now, let me see. Alsop, Fraser, Ed Chorley, Carl Goodkind, Sid Skinner, and Mark Waite have all kicked the bucket; Bart Stevens moved out to Essex; Old Shepherd took his family to South Africa; Fred Adams moved out of London, Chislehurst way-"

  "Chislehurst?" asked Burton.

  "Or thereabouts, yes. Edmund Cottle is one of my regulars, like Ted, here; Arnie Lovitt is still in the neighbourhood; his girl and her husband drink here every Friday night, though I doubt I'll see them for a while, the poor sods-their daughter, Lucy, went loopy a couple of weeks back; I hear they're putting her in Bedlam-and Eric Saydso is hanging on but probably won't be around for much longer-he's a consumptive. That's the lot; there was fourteen of us in all, plus the various wives and kids."

  "So the Brigade disbanded," noted Burton, "and then you gave up the Hog in the Pound?"

  "That's right. I got tired of the blooming place and all those Libertine idiots, so I sold up and bought this little boozer and-to answer your original question, sir-I named it the Tremors on account of the fact that people around here was so certain that the Technologists' power station would cause earthquakes and the like."

  "You've certainly had a high old time of it!" observed Burton. "What with the Technologists, the Libertines, Edward Oxford, and Spring Heeled Jack!"

  Punchinello blew out a breath and said, "He attracts crackpots!"

  Robinson laughed. "You've been my customer for nigh on thirty years, Edward Toppletree, so you may well be right! Anyway, gents, I have customers to serve. Give me a shout when you're ready for a top-up."

  He gave them a nod and shuffled away.

  "Nice talking to you," said Punchinello. "I'm going to sit by the fire and smoke me pipe. You positive you don't want to buy Fidget, here? His nose might be the Eighth blinkin' Wonder of the World!"

  "Positive!" replied Swinburne.

  They bade him farewell and watched as he shuffled away with the dog at his heels.

  "What do you think, Richard?" asked Swinburne quietly.

  "I think," responded Burton, "that we just picked up some very useful information and I'd better speak to Detective Inspector Trounce first thing in the morning!"

  BEETLE AND PANTHER

  Wearing loose-fitting white cotton kurta pyjamas, a saffron-coloured turban upon his head, and with his already swarthy skin darkened with walnut oil, Sir Richard Francis Burton strode purposefully along the bank of the Limehouse Cut canal. He'd made his way there through the disreputable streets of Limehouse unmolested by the rogues who inhabited London's great melting pot. The people of this district kept themselves to themselves, only mingling when there was a shady deal to be made or a dirty deed to be done.

  Without a disguise, Burton appeared barbarous enough to have probably avoided trouble. He was cautious though, and felt it best to take on the character of a foreigner. The guise of a Sikh was an obvious choice, for Sikhs possessed a reputation-undeserved, as it happened-for ferocity. This, together with his forked beard and terrible, magnetic eyes, gave him such a fearsome aspect that people quickly stepped out of his path as he swung along, and he'd arrived at the bank of the canal without having been even once approached.

  Late last night, after he and Swinburne made their way home from Bat tersea, Burton had slept much more deeply than usual, not waking until nine in the morning. After bolting down a grilled kipper and a round of toast, he'd gone to Scotland Yard to present Detective Inspector Trounce with the list of Battersea Brigade members.

  "By Jove!" the p
oliceman had exclaimed. "I can't believe they missed this; though I suppose it's understandable under the circumstances. The Yard didn't have a detective branch until the early forties, and I guess the fact that the Alsop attack happened near Epping tripped them up. There was no reason to look for a connection between the girls' fathers. I'll look into this, Captain Burton. In fact, I'll go down to Battersea myself today."

  An hour later, back at 14 Montagu Place, Burton found a message waiting for him from Oscar Wilde. Through the "boys' network," the youngster had arranged a meeting for him with the Beetle. The appointment was for three o'clock, and the venue was strange, to say the least.

  Burton was almost there.

  Along the sides of Limehouse Cut-a commercial waterway that linked the lower reaches of the River Lea with the Thames-some of the city's most active factories belched black smoke into the air and gave a meagre wage to the thousands of workers who toiled within. Many of these men, women, and children had yellow, red, green, or blue skin, permanently coloured by the industrial dyes they worked with; others were disfigured by scorch marks and blisters from hours spent next to furnaces or kilns; and all had callused hands, hard bony bodies, and the haunted look of starvation in their eyes.

  Burton walked past the huge, towering premises until he came to one particular building that, unlike its neighbours, had been abandoned. Standing seven storeys high, and with nearly every window either missing, broken, or cracked, it silently loomed over the busy canal-a shell, its chimneys impotent, its entrances bricked up.

  He circled it by passing through an arched passageway that gave access to Broomfield Street, crossing its barren frontage with the blocked loading bays and empty stables, then returning back along a second covered alley to the narrow docks at the side of the canal.

  People saw and ignored him. That was the way of things in Limehouse.

  Beside the dock, on the factory's wall, in a niche down which rusting gutter pipes ran, he found what he was looking for: iron rungs set into the brickwork.

  He shifted the bag that was slung across his shoulders, moving it so that it hung against the small of his back, then began to climb, testing each foothold before putting his weight on it.

  There had been a second message waiting for him at home that morning when he returned from Scotland Yard. It was from Isabel, and read: You will change your mind. We are destined for one another; I knew that the moment I saw you ten years ago. I will wait. For as long as it takes, I will wait.

  He'd sat considering it for some time, absently running a forefinger along the scar on his cheek. Then he'd composed and sent a terse reply:

  Do not wait. Live your life.

  It was brutal, he knew, but as with an amputation, a fast and clean cut is the quickest to heal.

  He continued upward until he eventually reached the top of the ladder, then heaved himself over the parapet and sat for a moment to catch his breath, looking across the flat roof at the two long skylights, the cracked panes of which had been made opaque by soot. In the centre of the roof, between the two rows of glass, eight chimneys soared high into the air. It was the third from the eastern side that interested him.

  He gingerly picked his way across the debris-covered roof, avoiding the areas that sagged, until he reached the nearest skylight. He skirted around its edge then moved over to the chimney.

  It had rungs affixed to it, running from the base all the way to the top. Once again, he climbed, marvelling at the view of London that unfurled beneath him. A cold breeze was blowing, making his loose attire flap, though he was kept warm by a thermal vest.

  He stopped, hooked an arm around a rung, and rested. He was halfway up and could see, far away, through the dirty haze and angled columns of smoke that rose like a forest from the city, the magnificent dome of St. Paul's. A few specks flew between him and the cathedral; rotorchairs and swans, the divergent forms of air transport developed by those two powerful factions within the Technologist caste, the Engineers and the Eugenicists.

  He sighed. It had come just too late for him, this new technology. If he'd had the advantage of the swans, as John Speke had during his second expedition, recent history would have been very different indeed.

  He continued his ascent, giving silent thanks that he didn't suffer from a fear of heights.

  Minutes later he reached the top and swung himself over to sit with one leg to either side of the chimney's lip. The breeze tugged at him but with a foot hooked through one of the rungs and his knees clamped tightly against the brickwork, he felt reasonably secure.

  He noticed that another set of metal rungs descended into the darkness of the flue.

  Burton pulled his shoulder bag around, opened it, took out a bound notebook, and started to read.

  For ten minutes he sat there, outlined against broken clouds and patches of blue sky, perched a precarious three hundred and fifty feet above the ground, the book in his hand, his noble brow furrowed with concentration, his savage jaw clenched, his clothes fluttering wildly.

  Eventually, there came a furtive rustle and scrape from within the chimney.

  Burton listened but didn't react.

  The hiss of falling soot.

  The scuffing of a boot against metal.

  Moments of silence.

  Then a quiet, sibilant voice: "What are you reading?"

  Without shifting his eyes from his notebook, Burton replied: "It's my own translation of the Behdristan, which is an imitation of the Gulistan of Sa'di, the celebrated Persian poet. It is written in prose and verse, and treats of ethics and education, though it abounds in moral anecdotes, aphorisms, and amusing stories, too."

  "And the original author?" hissed the voice.

  "Niir-ed-Di'n Abd-er-Rahman; the Light of Religion, Servant of the Merciful. He was born, it's believed, in 1414 in a small town called Ja'm, near Herat, the capital of Khurasin, and adopted Jami as his takhallus, or poetical name. He is considered the last of the great Persian writers."

  "I want it," whispered the voice from the darkness.

  "It is yours," responded the king's agent. "And I have other volumes here." He patted his shoulder bag.

  "What are they?"

  "My own works: Goa and the Blue Mountains, Scinde or the Unhappy Valley, and A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah."

  "You are an author?"

  "Among other things, yes."

  "Indian?"

  "No, this is a disguise I adopted in order to travel unmolested."

  "Limehouse is dangerous."

  "Yes."

  There was a pause, then the sepulchral tones came again: "What do you ask in return for the books?"

  "I ask to be permitted to help."

  "To help? To help with what?"

  "Not long ago, I saw wolflike creatures snatch a boy from the street. I know he isn't the first to have been taken, and I know that all the missing boys are chimney sweeps."

  A long silence followed.

  Burton closed his notebook, placed it in his bag, then removed the bag from his shoulders and lowered it by the strap into the darkness.

  A small mottled hand, so pale it was almost blue, reached out of the shadows within the flue and took the bag. A satisfied sigh echoed up from below.

  Burton said, "The books are yours, whether you give me any information or not."

  "Thank you," came the response. "It is true-the League of Chimney Sweeps is under attack and we do not know why."

  "How many boys have been taken?"

  "Twenty-eight."

  Burton whistled. "As many as that!"

  "They all returned but nine. Nine are still missing. Ten if you include the latest, Aubrey Baxter, the boy you saw abducted."

  "They are the ones most recently taken?"

  "No, not at all. Most come back; some don't."

  "And what of those who returned? What did they have to say?"

  "They remember nothing."

  "Really? Nothing at all?"

  "They
don't even remember the wolves. There is one thing, though."

  "What?" asked Burton.

  "All the boys who were taken-when they reappeared, they each bore a mark upon the forehead, between the eyes, about an inch above the bridge of the nose."

  "A mark?"

  "A small bruise surrounding a pinprick."

  "Like that made by a syringe?"

  "I have never seen the mark made by a syringe, but I imagine so, yes."

  "Can you arrange for me to meet one of these boys?"

  "Are you the police?"

  "No."

  "Wait."

  Burton waited. He watched a swan flying past in the near distance, a box kite trailing behind it, a man sitting in the kite, gripping the long reins.

  "Here," hissed the Beetle.

  The king's agent looked down and saw the worm-coloured arm reaching up out of the darkness. A piece of paper was held in the small fingers. He bent, stretched down, and took it.

  Upon the paper two addresses had been written.

  "Most of the boys live in the Cauldron," murmured the hidden sweep, "but that is too dangerous a place for such as you."

  Don't I know it! thought Burton.

  "There are some lodging houses which I rent in safer areas, such as these two. If you wait until tomorrow, I will see to it that you are expected; just say you have been sent by the Beetle. The first is where you'll find Billy Tupper, one of the fellows who returned. The second is a boarding house where three of the boys who are still missing lodged."

  "Their names?"

  "Jacob Spratt, Rajish Thakarta, and Benny Whymper. All these boys were taken whilst visiting fellow sweeps in the East End."

  "Thank you. This is very useful. Is there anything else you can tell me?"

  "On the other side of the paper I've listed all the boys who were taken and the dates of their abductions. I know nothing more."

  "Then I'll take my leave of you, with thanks. If I learn anything about these kidnappings, I'll return."

  "Drop three stones into the chimney. I'll respond. Bring more books."

  "On what subject?"

  "Philosophy, travel, art, poetry, anything."

  "You fascinate me," said Burton. "Won't you come out of the shadows?"