Sherlock Holmes

by Martin Rosenstock

  “Reckon you and Crooked John can lay hands on James Mackay?” he asked the taller of the two men. “Mackay’s an odd fish,” he confided to us, as his men quickly conferred with one another. “Thinks he’s a shoreman, but he in’t. Not by a long way he in’t.”

  Rae’s two men had clearly reached a conclusion. “I in’t seen him in a bit,” the tall man said, “but he never goes too far, do ’e?”

  “But what if’e don’t want to come?” asked the smaller man.

  “He’ll come,” replied Rae. “But if he in’t too keen, well, tell him there’s a gentleman here with a job for him. Though now I think on it,” he continued, turning to us, “he might still be leery, what with the bad blood between some here and hisself. Have you got one of them cards that the lads could take, to show him they’re in earnest? He can’t read, of course, but he’ll know the quality of the card when he sees it.”

  Holmes pulled out his wallet and pushed a card across the table. The taller of the two men examined it and grinned, then shoved it into his pocket. As he and his partner left I noticed that they stopped to take a wooden stave apiece from those hanging by the door. I shuddered and Long Bill gave a small chuckle.

  “Why, those are just our hoes, Doctor,” he explained. He squinted at Holmes and me quizzically. “Did you come here and not know even that much about us?”

  “As you so neatly surmised, we left Baker Street this morning with no fixed destination in mind, merely a glimmer of an idea of where to start our investigation.” Holmes lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Until half an hour ago, I had not so much as heard of shoremen, and would, I must confess, have assumed that the people who rake through the mud by the river and those who do so in the sewers were one and the same group.”

  Long Bill bristled a little at the suggestion, as I suspected had been Holmes’s intention, for I was sure he knew every detail of a shoreman’s life, as he did every facet of the London underworld. A moment later he relaxed, however, as the same realisation evidently struck him. “Now that’s an official trick, that is,” he said with a thin, cold smile. “Get a man angry and who knows what foolish thing he might say. Well, I in’t got anything to hide, Mr. Holmes. So, no, a mudlark in’t a shoreman. A mudlark’s no better than a pure man or a bunter, scraping in the dirt for the rubbish folks little better than hisself has throwed away. A shoreman, though, now he’s a different thing altogether. Working the shore takes nerve and strength. There’s danger, but there’s rewards too. Rewards that a dirty mudlark can only dream about.”

  “Evidently, you do well for yourselves,” Holmes observed, glancing round the neat and tidy bar room. “Do you often find gold rings?”

  “Gold rings?” Long Bill’s puzzlement could not have been more clear. “Now and again, mebbe,” he continued, “but not more than once in a year or two. There’s not a man here makes less than two pounds a week,” he explained proudly, “but that’s earned by hard work, not by stumbling over gold rings!” He laughed, as did several other men in earshot. “Gold rings indeed! No, we earn our bread by learning the ways of a tunnel, and getting to know the places where lost things collect. And that’s where the hoe comes in.”

  He turned in his chair and asked for one of the peculiar objects to be passed to him. I was struck again by his air of command. He expected to be obeyed, though not because he thought himself better than his fellows. I suspected, in fact, that it was those same people who made that judgement on his behalf, or at least considered him well placed to advise them wisely. I had occasionally come across such men in the army, privates with little formal education yet who exuded a charisma and an air of confidence which inspired the men around them.

  “This is my hoe,” Rae said, gripping the thick wooden pole which had been handed to him, and turning it first one way, then the other, so that we could see it properly. The hoe was about as thick as a man’s fist, four foot or so long and, I was interested to note, buffed to a round smoothness at one end. At the other end, a piece of metal had been forced into the wood and bent into a hook shape. I looked across at Holmes, but said nothing, as he gave the most minute shake of his head.

  “It’s a simple tool,” Long Bill continued, as Holmes lifted the hoe and twisted in it his hands. “Mainly we uses it for balance, and to prod the ground round us, looking for deep spots in the mud. But we’ve also got the hook to pull things out of the muck, if needs be – and more than one shoreman’s pulled hisself free with it, too.”

  “Perfectly suited to your needs,” Holmes remarked approvingly, running a finger across the smooth wood.

  Before Long Bill could reply, the door opened behind us, and the two men he had sent for James Mackay entered. Between them walked a decidedly peculiar figure, who took one terrified look at Long Bill Rae and tried to run. He almost made it, too. Before either of his escorts could lay a hand upon him, he slipped to one side and yanked open the door. Had it not been for another man fortuitously entering at the same time he would have been off down the street. As it was, he rebounded from the door back into the room, and was quickly held and then thrown to the floor before us.

  Instinctively, I took a step towards the newcomer to help him up, but Holmes’s warning hand on my arm held me back, and instead he was left to push himself to his knees unaided, though he made no attempt actually to rise to his feet. He looked up at Rae, then curiously across at Holmes and myself, allowing me to observe him more closely.

  He was only slightly shorter than the other men in the room, but in every other respect he stood out from his compatriots. His face was large and almost spherical, with a wide mouth overfull of brown teeth and a prominent nose above which two small black eyes were pressed close together. He was clad in a manner which brought to mind a phrase I had once heard used in the music halls: “a sorry imitation of a gentleman”. From the battered brown brogues on his feet to the tattered bowler on his head, every part of his dress mimicked that of a man of society, though the threadbare nature of each element rendered it ridiculous. His stained shirt and ragged tie were hidden by a waistcoat with one badly stitched pocket, and a decrepit frockcoat, one shoulder of which was streaked with dull red dirt. His hair was sandy coloured and parted in the centre, and thick with grease.

  “He weren’t ’appy to come, Bill,” one of Rae’s men said, with a shrug, kicking at the kneeling man with his boot.

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” Quickly, he stood and removed his coat, then folded it neatly and placed it under his hat on a nearby table. “Not that I had much choice.”

  The newcomer’s voice held a note of challenge as he looked up at Rae. Whatever had prompted his initial fear, it had quickly subsided.

  He was certainly not unintelligent, I will say that for him. He noticed Holmes and me at once, the two strangers in the company, and though he tried to hide it, I believe he decided from the first that we offered his best chance of emerging from this meeting unscathed. For it was plain, even before Long Bill lunged from his chair and grabbed the front of his grubby, once-white shirt, that Mackay was not a popular man.

  “Watch your tongue!” Rae roared in fury, heaving the smaller man off his feet in a single movement and pushing him back onto a table, as though moving a sack of coal onto a cart. “We in’t fools, Mackay, and don’t you think we are!”

  Spittle dotted Mackay’s face, but he showed no sign of noticing, and his voice when he spoke was placatory. “I was sorry to hear about Rob, Bill,” he said. “He was a good man.” Whatever the motivation, these commiserations were well said, but I wondered at Mackay’s sense as he continued, “Better’n some I could mention.”

  Had Holmes not stepped forward and placed himself between Rae and Mackay, I believe a fresh murder would have been committed at that instant.

  “Mr. Rae,” he exhorted, “I have said that I will find your nephew’s murderer, but I cannot do so if you beat to a pulp the man I require to assist me to do so! Please release Mr. Mackay and allow me to put my questions to him – and
to you.”

  The older man nodded, his rage again dissipating as swiftly as it had risen, his emotions evidently too raw to allow any dissenting voice, but his intelligence too great to let anger take control of him for long. He sagged backwards into his chair, but did not take his eyes off Mackay.

  “Very well, Mr. Holmes. Though maybes I weren’t entirely honest with you earlier. I said that no man here wanted Rob done in, but I din’t say there were no man at all.” He spat on the floor at Mackay’s feet. “This useless devil was seen fighting with Rob not two weeks since.”

  “I was not—” Mackay began to protest, but Holmes snapped at him to be silent, and he swiftly subsided into discontented, but muted, grumbling.

  “Then you knew he would not come to you willingly, and used my card to lure him here?”

  “You saw how slippery he can be, Mr. Holmes,” Rae protested, without apology. “I knew as soon as you said Rob’d bin struck from behind that this—” Words failed him and he swallowed and began again. “I knew Mackay was the killer. He’s done it before; attacked a man outside a pub three years since, hit him across the back with an iron bar. Did six months in the Ville for that. And it’s well known he was jealous of Rob.”

  “Jealous for what reason?” Holmes asked.

  “Because Mackay was a mudlark at the time Rob spent his days on the ’flats, and they was friends, once. But Rob grew up and he had no time for those as he left behind. He din’t have much time for anybody, truth be told, but Mackay took it bad and everybody knew it.”

  Holmes nodded and took a long look at Mackay, who glowered back at him from beneath twisted brows.

  “He’s a known cheat and a thief,” Long Bill continued, “who’d take the coins off the eyes of a corpse. And everybody knows Rob had money. A more worthless, less honest blackguard than James Mackay you’ll struggle to find from one end of London to the other.”

  “Now that’s a bare-faced lie!” Mackay piped up, then grinned as he added, “I know at least two worse’n me!” He pulled himself to his feet cautiously, and could not stop his eyes from flicking across to Bill Rae, who glared at him unblinkingly, but said nothing. Seemingly reassured that there was no further threat of immediate violence from that quarter, he visibly grew in confidence.

  “But I reckon it’s time we was introduced, mister,” he said. “James Mackay at your service.”

  “My name is Sherlock Holmes,” my friend replied cordially, “and this is my colleague Dr. Watson. We are investigating the death of Robert Rae, and these gentlemen—” he indicated the shoremen arranged around us “—believe that you may be able to help us in our enquiries.”

  “That was nothing to do with me, Mr. Holmes,” Mackay responded readily. “I was nowhere near Red Rob,” he went on, “and I haven’t seen him for more’n a month. If someone’s done for Rob Rae, it was not me, and nobody here can say it was.”

  The noisy but generalised scrape of a dozen men shifting in a dozen chairs gave the lie to that assertion, but Holmes paid them no heed, and quickly reassured the man.

  “No, and nobody will say it, Mackay, if it is not true.”

  He turned to Long Bill. “A gold sovereign was found in your nephew’s possession,” he said mildly. “It seems unlikely that plain robbery could have been the motive for his murder.”

  Long Bill reluctantly nodded his agreement. “If that’s enough for you to decide he din’t do it, Mr. Holmes, then no more need be said,” he muttered. “Lucky for you, though, Mackay. Otherwise, you’d be floating in the river yourself before the day was out.”

  Holmes returned his gaze to Mackay. “It appears that you have a reputation for thievery, and it is that which has perversely convinced your neighbours that you are innocent of this particular crime.”

  Mackay did not appear in the slightest abashed. Rather, recognising perhaps that he was not in any immediate danger, he seemed to take pride in the description.

  “Thievery is a harsh word, Mr. Holmes,” he said with an insolent grin. “There’s nobody else to look out for me but myself, and plenty who’d be happy to do me a bad turn. I stick by those who stick by me, and let the Devil take the rest. Is that not right, Bill? Haven’t I heard you say that yourself often enough?” He grinned suddenly. “Bill here dislikes me, you see, for I was Rob’s friend when Long Bill had no time for him. No time for his own flesh and blood! Have you ever heard the like, Mr. Holmes?”

  Again, Holmes’s eyes flickered in warning towards Bill Rae, then back to Mackay.

  “Be that as it may, were you arguing with Rob Rae two weeks ago?”

  Mackay shook his head with exaggerated weariness and, with deliberate offence, pretended to yawn. “I was not. Have I not just said that I’d not laid eyes on the man for a month or more?”

  I was sure that he was lying. And, from the frown that never left his face, so was Long Bill.

  “You did,” Holmes replied, before anyone could protest. “Yet, these gentlemen believe that you were seen in his company more recently than that.”

  Mackay shrugged. “I can’t be held responsible for their bad eyesight, now can I?”

  “Perhaps, then, we might have better luck with your whereabouts more recently. Where were you the night before last, for instance?”

  “The night before last…?” Mackay nodded his head fiercely, answering his own question. “Yes, I was in my room. Business was slow and I’d not a shilling to spend.”

  “Indeed? What is it you do for a living?”

  “A bit of this, and a bit of that,” he laughed. “I can turn my hand to most things, but mostly I make things to sell.”

  “But not on that night, so you stayed in your room. You did not go out, even for a drink? Not here, perhaps, but in another establishment?”

  “Ha! I’m not welcome here even when I have money to spend. Nor many other places, neither.”

  “Do you have a hoe like this one?” Holmes asked suddenly, swinging the long wooden stave from the table. Involuntarily, I sat forward in my seat, keen to hear Mackay’s response.

  “Something like that,” he admitted cheerily, apparently unmoved by the turn the conversation had taken. “And what if I do? It’s not just toshers who use a hoe!”

  “Indeed,” Holmes, to my surprise, agreed equitably with Mackay. “I ask merely because I wondered if some of the this and that which you do involves working inside the sewer system?”

  Mackay was clearly not keen to answer. He glanced nervously at the silent men around him. “Sometimes,” he muttered finally.

  “You have, in the past, been down the tunnel worked by Rob Rae?”

  Mackay nodded, almost imperceptibly, and again the room shifted noisily around us.

  “But not recently?” Holmes pressed.

  “Not for years.” Mackay’s voice had lost all trace of levity now, and he seemed to retreat into himself, smoothing his hair compulsively as he spoke. Again, I was certain he was lying. He reached over to his folded coat, then seemed to think better of it and pulled his hand away. A moment passed and, evidently having reconsidered, he slipped his hand inside the jacket and slid out a battered hip flask from which he took a long draught. His hand shook and the alcohol spilled down his chin and onto the floor. “Rob and me were pals once, but we both knew how things were.”

  His eyes flicked round the room, as though daring anyone to disagree with him. All eyes were on him, but nobody spoke.

  “And how were they?” asked Holmes, breaking the silence.

  “Rob followed the toshers’ rules. Long Bill’s rules.” Mackay was hesitant, but seemingly unable to stop himself speaking. “Only a shoreman can go down a sewer. And Bill Rae decides who’s a shoreman, and who isn’t.”

  “I do,” Rae agreed without rancour. “Someone has to, and why shouldn’t it be me? There in’t room underground for those as in’t born to the life; I told you, Mr. Holmes. It’s a dangerous place.”

  “But you are willing to allow Mackay here to guide Watson and myself down
your nephew’s tunnel?”

  “If you think it needs doing to find him as killed Rob, then yes. I won’t ask one of my men to risk his life but I reckon this one’s bin down there more recent than he says.” There was an undercurrent of threat in Long Bill’s voice as he held Mackay’s gaze.

  “That’s why I was dragged here?” asked Mackay, addressing Holmes directly. “To guide you down Rob’s sewer?”

  “If you are willing,” confirmed Holmes. “I believe there may be evidence inside that tunnel that will lead us to the murderer. All I ask is that you take us in as far as we might travel in safety, and that you hand over to me anything out of the ordinary which you might discover.”

  Mackay did not even pause for thought. “Why not?” he grinned. “When did you have in mind?”

  “At daybreak, I think,” Holmes suggested. “At the entrance to the tunnel?”

  Mackay nodded briskly. “As good a time and place as any,” he observed, reaching for his jacket and hat. He held them tightly in his hands as though to protect himself as he backed away from us, towards the door. The two men who had fetched him to Matty Gray’s moved to block his path, but Long Bill waved his hand quickly, and the pair stepped aside and allowed him to leave.

  “Will he meet us, do you think?” I asked in the silence which followed his departure.

  Holmes nodded. “I believe so, Watson.”

  “If he doesn’t, don’t you worry, Doctor,” Rae added grimly. “The boys can find him again quick enough.”

  “I believe he will meet us,” Holmes repeated, gathering up his hat and gloves. “For the moment, however, I thank you for your assistance, Mr. Rae. Watson and I will be in touch should we uncover anything tomorrow.”

  In reply, Long Bill raised his glass and tilted it in our direction. “Your good health,” he said. “Be careful of Mackay. He in’t to be trusted. No matter what he says, he was with our Rob in the last fortnight, and he knows enough to lose two innocents like yourselves underground, and you’ll never be seen again if he does.”