by Will Thomas
My employer shifted in the bed. He looked like he was in a good deal of pain, not that he would admit it.
“What brings you to England?” he asked.
“The SS Kintyre. I was accompanying a witness that America was too hot for. He was peaching on a local secret society, and they weren’t very happy with him. I have a few other errands for Mr. Pinkerton while I’m in London.”
“Have you been to the office?” the Guv asked.
“I have.”
Barker turned his head slightly in my direction. The movement made him grimace. He’s getting by on sheer will, I told myself.
“How bad is it?” he asked. I realized he’d been unconscious since the bombing and had no idea of the extent of the damage.
“I’m sorry. The floor is gone, sir,” I answered.
“We’ll have to rebuild. Until then you’ll have to find temporary quarters.”
“He has,” Caleb answered. “He set up camp above your office.”
“I’m hoping to salvage some of the furniture, sir,” I said.
They weren’t listening. I watched as the two men regarded each other.
“You look like Father,” Caleb continued.
“And you favor Mother’s side of the family. Long and rangy.”
“Brass tacks, lads,” Caleb said. “Who did this and what are we going to do about it?”
“What do you mean ‘we’?” Barker asked. “I’m sure you have work of your own to do.”
“I do, but this is clan business.” Caleb Barker grinned. “Are you still thumping your Bible, Cyrus?”
“If by that you mean am I comforted by scripture, the answer is yes.”
“I go to a Christmas Eve service now and again if I’m in a city. Mostly I’m working, though.”
“Mother would not approve,” the Guv rumbled.
“In case you haven’t noticed, Cyrus, Mother’s dead. Father, too. Do you need my help? I’ve got things to do if you’ve got no use for me.”
They both had a temper, I thought. Looking over, I saw Mrs. Ashleigh staring over her embroidery, enthralled. This was a part of Cyrus Barker that she had never seen.
“Stay for a few weeks,” Barker said. “Until I’m better. Move into the house if you wish. I’ve got plenty of room.”
Caleb Barker gave him an ornery smile.
“Much obliged, little brother, but no, thank you.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“What do we do now, sir?” I asked, though I was reluctant to ask the question in front of his brother.
I had plans of my own, of course, but I wanted to let him make the decision if he could. I was certain once he was fully awake, he would be even more eager than I to find whoever was responsible for the bombing.
“What have you done so far?” the Guv asked.
I told him of examining the remains of the blast with the fire captain, accumulating the files, the details of Mrs. Archer’s visit, the arrival of his brother, and the list of suspects sent to Scotland Yard.
“What made you suspicious of Mrs. Archer?”
“There was something about her manner. She didn’t seem as grieved as one might be if one’s husband was missing. In fact, she had a coquettish manner and there was a look in her eye, as if she was capable of anything.”
“You were wise to follow her. It’s unfortunate that she escaped before you got some solid answers.”
“Can you think of anyone who might hate you so much as to do this?” I asked.
“I must consider the matter. Caleb?”
“Still here, Cyrus.”
“Can you track?”
“With the best of them. What do you need me to do?”
“Try the tunnel under the offices. It’s possible the bombers came through there.”
“There are two problems with that, sir,” I interjected. “The tunnel has been blocked off with boards, and the clerk at the desk won’t let anyone pass.”
“Oh, Hell’s bells,” Caleb said. “As if some flimsy wood and an even flimsier clerk are going to stop me.”
“Take the lad with you to the tunnel.”
Barker’s brother flipped a thumb over his shoulder in my direction. “Lad?”
“Sir,” I said to my employer, “I’m twenty-six and about to be married. Don’t you think we can do without that word?”
“You’re not married yet, laddie,” he said in his Lowland accent.
Caleb stood. “Come, laddie.”
I gave my employer a withering look.
“I’ll meet you outside,” I told Caleb.
When he left, I turned to my employer. “That man is impossible. He’s trying to run the investigation himself. What do you want me to do?”
“Suffer his presence as best you can. Come in to see me as often as possible to discuss what’s happening.” He paused and gave me a hard stare. “Oh, and Thomas, do not trust that man under any circumstances.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
I took my leave from the room and found Caleb out on the street waiting for me, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a cigarette.
“Got a question for you,” my companion said, putting on his hat again. “Between you and me.”
“What is it?” I asked, hailing a cab.
“Is he any good?”
“Mr. Barker?” I asked, surprised. “He’s very good indeed. His methods aren’t usual, but they’re effective. He’s often in competition with Scotland Yard if he isn’t working with them. He considers it a point of honor to try to reach the solution first.”
“So it’s not a matter of putting an ad in The Times.”
“Wait,” I said after we had climbed aboard the hansom. “You said you’d seen the sign on the door by accident.”
“Did I?” he asked, not the least put out by being caught in a lie.
That was all I needed, another brother as secretive as the first. Who was this fellow, anyway? Of course, he was Barker’s brother, and a Pinkerton agent according to his papers, but we knew nothing of him or what he had done over the past twenty years. He could have been one of those desperados I had read about.
“How did he make his money?” Caleb asked. “That house of his is pretty fancy.”
“I have no idea. He won’t talk about it.”
Two could play at being secretive. I knew Barker had made his fortune diving for sunken ships, but I was under no obligation to tell it to anyone else. Caleb looked as if he didn’t believe me.
“Do you have experience tracking?” I asked.
“I was a tracker for the U.S. Army during the Modoc War.”
A few minutes later, we arrived at the office. Caleb directed me to light a lamp. Then, carefully, I climbed down the rope to the basement with the lit lamp in one hand. It was far more difficult than I had anticipated. I was relieved when I finally reached the rubble-strewn floor.
“Look out!” he called, sliding down the rope to the floor. I stepped back to give him room, raising the lantern high.
“They’ve nailed a sheet of birch over the tunnel,” I said. “We’ll need to get some tools.”
He lifted a trouser leg and retrieved a knife from inside his boot.
“This should be all I need.”
“What is that?”
The knife was long, practically a short sword, with a wide heel tapering to a sharp point. The handle seemed to be made of some kind of horn.
“It’s called an ‘Arkansas toothpick.’ Good for any number of things.”
He slid the point by the edge of the board and began to pry it loose. Once the first corner gave way, the rest followed rather easily. We moved the heavy board and stepped into the tunnel.
The ceiling was low, and most of the area was taken up by pipes and cables, providing the heart of London with communication. Beside it was a narrow corridor. Caleb appropriated the lamp and squatted down, looking at the dusty concrete floor.
“The tunnel’s empty,” I said.
“Quiet.”
/> He scrutinized the ground inch by inch, picking up anything that wasn’t part of the tunnel itself: nails, bits of wood, etc. He took infinite care, which meant, as far as I could see, that he was wasting my precious time. There were files to examine and I had neither the skills, the patience, nor the desire to crawl about in a tunnel all day.
Caleb Barker grunted and pulled something from a crack in the wall. It was a small bottle, of the sort which carried patent medicine, the kind that was almost pure alcohol. Obviously, some of the employees of the telephone exchange were not as morally upright as others. Barker’s brother lifted the bottle to his eye and peered inside with the aid of the lamp.
“Dry,” he said, setting it carefully back where he had found it.
Then he moved on and examined another bit of ground. At that rate we would still be there at midnight.
“Can’t we go faster?” I asked.
He looked scornfully over his shoulder. I’d accused my employer from time to time of being ill-tempered, but I was beginning to wonder if he was the more genial of his family.
We pressed on another few feet, inch by irritating inch. I’d have simply left him there and gone back to work like a sensible person, but the Guv had sent us on this fool’s errand. He had settled the question of who was heading this enquiry very quickly: he was. If there was any comfort to be had it was that I was accustomed to standing in Barker’s shadow, both figuratively and physically, but his brother was not. He was used to being out on the prairie, running an investigation all by himself.
We were at least a dozen yards down the tunnel, and by a sharp turn south, when he actually found something. It was the fag end of a cigarette, smashed by the heel of a shoe. He picked it up and examined it, holding it very close to his eye. I suspected he needed spectacles, but knew better then to suggest it.
“G-A-U-,” he began.
“Gauloises,” I said. “French cigarettes. Our chef, Etienne, smokes them.”
“Are they common in England?” he asked.
“I shouldn’t think so. There must be a tobacconist that sells them in London, for French expatriates, but I’ve never seen them. Perhaps Etienne knows.”
Caleb raised the cigarette end to his nose and sniffed it, then he rolled it between his fingers until the small morsel of tobacco inside fell into his hand. He sniffed that as well.
“No more than a day or two old,” he pronounced.
We crawled around the bend in the tunnel, and came upon a second find, a spent lucifer. He gave it much the same treatment as he had the cigarette.
“There you go,” he said.
“Where, exactly?”
“You can’t move about in an unlit tunnel in the dark unless you’re a mole. This man stopped and lit a lantern or a lamp here, unless he merely used the match to see where he was going.”
“That makes sense. And look over there! Another cigarette.”
“We’re not there yet. Don’t jump ahead.”
He crawled, nearly on his stomach, until he reached the cigarette. I looked over his shoulder.
“The end here,” he said. “It’s been bitten. It was held in the teeth. The other was perfectly round, with no teeth marks. It was smoked by someone holding the end between his lips. I’ll bet—”
“There were two smokers.”
“Yup.”
“Two men to set the charges,” I continued.
“It’s easier that way.”
Caleb crawled on until he came to the stairs at the far side of the tunnel. He examined each stair, and then pressed on the diagonal door leading outside to the embankment.
“It’s locked,” I said. “It would be now.”
“It’s still worthwhile to check.”
“This tracking business brings taking pains to a higher level.”
We returned through the tunnel to the rope and began to climb. Caleb was older than Barker by several years, but had little trouble scaling the rope. In a couple of minutes we were standing in front of Craig’s Court.
“How long is a Galywas?”
“Gauloises. Not very long at all,” I replied. “Half the length of a British cigarette, but strong. Why?”
He ignored my comment but made a request.
“Could you take me around the other side of that door?” he asked. “I still need to follow the trail.”
I sighed. “Fine. Come this way.”
There’s a narrow exit through Craig’s Court to the Embankment behind. I led him through until we came to the Thames, and around the long east side to the diagonal door. He continued to search the area thoroughly. The man was part bloodhound.
“Here you go,” Caleb said, pointing down to the ground beside an elm. I came closer.
“Two more cigarette ends,” I said. One was flattened and the other had burned down to the filter.
“One man stepped on his. The other flicked it away.”
“Two men,” I agreed. “And the match was to light a lamp or something.”
“Two Frenchmen,” he corrected. “Unless there are two Englishmen in London who enjoy torturing themselves with French tobacco.”
“What’s wrong with French tobacco?” I asked.
“Not much, except you might as well have used the match to burn your tongue. I’m American. I know good Virginia tobacco, and not this inferior weed here.”
“Etienne likes them.”
“Just because he knows food don’t make him an expert in tobacco.”
I tried to keep from smiling, but I’m not sure I succeeded. “Is that it? Can you track out here?”
“They took this stone path along the river. A few hundred people have walked along here since then. Any sign is long gone.”
“The Frenchmen.”
“Yup. Look for Frenchmen on your list. You’re welcome.”
“Thank you.”
I fell into step beside him, his long stride almost as difficult to keep up with as his brother’s.
“Have you ever met a Frenchman?” I asked. “Besides Etienne, I mean.”
“No, but I have met their little cousins, the Creoles. Been down to Storyville after a case. The men are fops, but the women are uncommonly pretty.”
“You’ve been all over America, then,” I said.
“Most of it. My line of work has taken me all over, including north to Canada and south to Mexico.”
We summoned a cab and clambered aboard.
“You must have a lot of stories after your travels.”
He bristled then. “This isn’t a campfire and my history is nobody’s business but mine.”
“I didn’t mean to pry. I was merely curious.”
“Curiosity can get you shot in the Territories.”
“Then I’ll remind myself never to visit the Territories.”
The man actually chuckled. “You do that. Don’t want to see that head of hair of yours decorating the end of a lance.”
“They really scalp people? I thought that was a myth.”
“I wish it were. See, they take a knife and cut around the hairline like so, from above.”
He drew a line about the edges of my hair with his finger.
“After that, they tug back the flap in front just an inch. Then they yank on it and pull it right off. Some seize the flap between their teeth and rip it off that way. Believe it or not, some men survive it.”
“What happens to them?”
“They wear a lot of hats and are not presentable to polite society.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
I had a list of suspects, and I thought it likely that researching them would result in enough evidence to incriminate one of them in the bombing. That was the process of enquiry work, though in his eccentric orbit about each case, Cyrus Barker never did the expected. He didn’t plod. That was Scotland Yard’s forte, and they did it well. My employer used flashes of inspiration to bring cases to a close quickly, generally within two weeks. During an investigation he would eat wherever and whatever he came across, sleep li
ttle, and work around the clock. I had learned to do the same, if only to accommodate my employer. He enjoyed it, I think, the work. It was a challenge.
I was about to follow leads across the country, verifying the location of each suspect, and questioning them, if possible. Caleb had disappeared, on another of his innumerable errands. That still left one fly in the ointment: Mrs. Archer. She could lead us on a merry chase and, quite frankly, I didn’t have time for it. Who did she work for? A young woman like that did not have a personal reason to hurt Cyrus Barker. Was she the relative of one of the men, or was she paid? She was an enigma, and I hate enigmas.
Climbing down the stair from number 5, I turned into Craig’s Court, around the east side of the telephone exchange, to the diagonal door housed in an old mansion known as Harrington House. Just before reaching it, I opened a door on the wall opposite ours and stepped in. The office was empty, but a call brought a man from the back room. He wore no jacket and his sleeves were rolled to the elbows. He’d been washing his hands.
“J.M.?” I asked. “Are you busy?”
“Thomas, come in!” he said, waving me inside the room. “I was just working on a brief. How’s the old man?”
J. M. Hewitt was a detective who had given up a profitable career as a barrister to track information and question suspicious people. Normally he worked exclusively for law offices, but from time to time he’d take on a case we were too busy for. As detectives go, he never had a wolf at the door, but then he specialized in a specific and wealthy clientele.
“First of all,” I said, “he’s no more than ten years older than you. But he’s not in good shape at the moment. His shin bone is broken.”
“Bad luck. Give him my best the next time you see him.”
“Thank you very much for helping yesterday.”
“It was the least I could do. Push has been very good to me.”
“Push” was the term many of the Underworld, which unfortunately includes detectives, called my employer. Somehow he’d acquired the moniker “Governor,” which was translated into criminal patois rhyming slang as “Push-comes-to-shove,” and then later shortened to “Push.”