The Hellfire Conspiracy

by Will Thomas

  “That is terrible, sir.”

  “Aye. Commingled with this family atmosphere is every kind of vice you can imagine. The bawdy houses are studded all through the Green, like currants in a scone. Whitechapel wears its evil openly, but while Bethnal Green has an air of respectability, it is no less vice ridden. Small wonder the constables walk their beat here in pairs. Turn here.”

  We walked northward. It seemed like every other road and possibly better than most. I saw a cab pull up and disgorge a gentleman, who passed into some sort of private club.

  “We are in the most disreputable area in all of London. I’ve always wondered why God does not destroy it with fire and brimstone, as he did Sodom. Even Vic’s boys avoid it.”

  We headed into Cambridge Road and soon saw Green Street again. As we neared it, we passed a building covered in turrets until it fairly bristled into the sky.

  “What is this, an annex to the church across the street?” I asked. It looked very old and somewhat ecclesiastic.

  “It is the Lunatic Asylum. The district grew up and around this building and the church. Ah, look. There is the C.O.S.”

  “Shall we stop in and see if anything has changed?” I asked.

  “No, we shall return here in the morning. Before then, I wish to acquaint myself with every street in the area.”

  Six o’clock passed, and seven o’clock, and still Barker called no break. Would we not eat? I wanted to save Gwendolyn DeVere as much as he, but my body was crying for food and my energy was flagging. We laced the streets of Bethnal Green as if it were an old boot, and still he would not stop. Seven thirty stretched into eight o’clock. Was he fasting? I’d been raised a good Methodist, and watched my mother fast on rare occasions, but I had never done it myself. I wasn’t certain I could, but I did not want to be found wanting by my employer. So I said nothing, though my stomach rumbled and twisted in discomfort. Finally, at eight thirty, according to my watch, I could be silent no more.

  “Sir, are we going to have dinner tonight?” I asked.

  As it turned out, I picked the worst street in London to say it. Barker stepped up to a vendor just beginning to pack up and ordered one of whatever it was they sold.

  “We’re shuttin’ down for the night, sir,” the man said. “I can’t guarantee they be as ’ot as they was.”

  “No matter,” Barker said. Apparently it wasn’t, to him.

  “Very well, sir, but I won’t charge you. You can help yourself to what’s left.”

  The Guv turned and put dinner in my hand, a lump wrapped in soiled newspaper. I opened it and found a potato that had been roasted in bacon grease. Then he handed me a drink, a tin cup of lukewarm tea. It was connected to the stand by a stout chain. Goodness knows how many people had drunk from that cup since it had last been washed. The night before, we had dined on pheasant and lobster and a rare bottle of wine, for our butler, Jacob Maccabee, was attempting to establish a wine selection in his room. Such is life, I told myself. Philosophy always goes well with poor food. I bit the potato once, twice, three times, then washed it down with the stewed tea. The author George MacDonald said that a potato is enough of a meal for any man. A Scotsman, perhaps, I thought. I offered the rest to my employer and when he refused, I tossed it into the gutter.

  The sun had vanished like the light of a spent match. Bethnal Green was not Mayfair; such light as there was brought out the fallen women displaying their cheap finery, attracted to the light the way a candle draws moths. Barker showed them the photograph and questioned them as readily as anyone else in the district, though it brought nothing but ribald comments from their lips.

  There was a flash of ghostly white at my elbow and a more corporeal clatter of hooves on cobblestones, and before I could do anything, Major DeVere had sprung from his horse. He was in mufti.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “We have secured a photograph of your daughter,” Barker replied, “and have been questioning people. We have been taking each street systematically, but nothing has turned up so far.”

  “She’s really gone. I can’t believe it,” DeVere said, shaking his head. “My girl in the hands of filthy white slavers. I mean, some part of me still clung to the hope she was off playing somewhere and would return in my absence.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Just keep looking.”

  “We must stop at midnight in order to be ready to search again at eight.”

  “Very well, carry on,” he stated like the officer that he was. He climbed back onto his gelding and rode off.

  “There goes a soul in torment,” I said, watching the ghost horse as it disappeared into the night. Barker made no comment. I turned to see he was not there to make one. Somehow between the time the major had jumped onto his steed and ridden off, my employer had disappeared.

  “Oy!” Barker suddenly bellowed down one of the passages at a pair of shadowy figures. He plunged into an alley off Globe Road so narrow his shoulders nearly scraped on both sides. We shot out of the alleyway into the next thoroughfare, narrowly avoiding being run down by a cart, then plunged into another across the street. I could make out some movement ahead of us but no more than that. The Guv was advancing swiftly, however, and in a minute or two he seized his quarry.

  “Got you!” Barker said, lighting a match against the rough brick. Our quarry were two large women in their late fifties, perhaps, so unattractive as to conjure the word “hags” in my mind. “Why, it’s Mum Alice. And surely this cannot be Dirty Annie. I thought you were both in the stir.”

  The first began to mewl a sort of answer to my employer, but her moniker was due to an unfortunate disfigurement that made her nearly unintelligible. The explanation was taken up by her friend, who was so porcine it was a wonder to me how she had traversed the alleyway. Her hair hung long, gray, and greasy down her back, and the dress she wore looked like a tent.

  “Alice just got out of Holloway Prison a month ago, yer worship, and I left work’ouse Tuesday last.”

  “How are you mudlarks getting by? Still doing the kinchin lay?”

  Kinchin lay? I wondered. I wasn’t familiar with a great deal of thieve’s cant, but a lay was a crime, a dodge, some sort of trick to be played at someone else’s expense.

  “No, sir, ’pon my honor. We learnt our lesson, hain’t we, Alice? Just scrapin’ by like. Doin’ some rag pickin’. Caught a few rats for the ratman, enough for a pint and a pasty twixt the two of us, but we hain’t made so much as a farthing today.”

  Barker lit another match and held the photograph up to the light. “A child has gone missing today. Girl, twelve years of age, blue sailor dress, white collar with a stripe around it. Black hose and petticoats. Brown patent leather boots. The peelers will be checking every fence and pawnshop in the East End.”

  Annie put out a pudgy hand. “Oh, stop, yer worship, please. You’re making me mouth water. Sounds like Rowes of Bond Street. Very high priced. Couldn’t ask for better.”

  “I want you ladies to know if any of these articles should appear in the area, I’ll be laying for both of you unless you find them first. Am I getting through to you?”

  “Yes, yer worship,” Annie said, her voice high and trembling with fear. Alice had begun to mewl again.

  “You girls hear of any slavers in the area?”

  “No, no,” Annie said, and Alice shook her head emphatically. “If they’re here, they keep to themselves. They ain’t local—not permanent, anyways.”

  “Off with you, then. Give them sixpence and not a farthing more, Thomas.”

  Both hags scuttled forward and circled me. I could smell the rank odor and see the dirt that gave Annie her sobriquet. I slipped a sixpence into her hand and wished I could wash my own.

  “Find some gainful employment,” Barker ordered, “or I’ll find it for you. I’m watching you.”

  “Yes, sir,” they said, shuffling off. “Fank you, yer worship!”

  We emerged again in the opposite direction into the
welcome light of a gas lamp.

  “What is a kinchin lay?” I asked.

  “It’s stealing the clothing off children. It’s the first thing I thought of when I heard Miss DeVere had gone missing. The child is not usually hurt and generally comes home crying and embarrassed. If such a thing had happened to Miss DeVere, however, she would have returned by now, surely.”

  “I’d never realized how easy it was for a child to go missing,” I said aloud, as we returned to Globe Road and resumed our search. “Bethnal Green’s got to have one of the highest populations per square mile in all England. Hundreds of eyes are watching one every day. Surely, if a child disappeared, someone would be able to say, ‘I saw her on Friday morning at ten on Green Street.’”

  “One would think such would be the case, lad, but the sheer population means the average citizen on the street might see hundreds of individuals in a single hour. I want you to think of this, too: the disappearance of Miss DeVere is a tragedy, and I fear no good will come of it, but suppose the child had been poor. Would our dragnet be put out then? Would any official notice have occurred if ten were missing, or twenty?”

  “’Ello, gents,” Soho Vic said as we came out of the alleyway. He was leaning nonchalantly against the side of a building, picking his teeth with a splinter of wood, looking as sloppy and mismatched as only a street urchin can. “What gives, Push?”

  “We would consult, Vic,” Barker stated. He always treated Vic like an adult, rather than the species of vermin he was. I’ll grant that on occasion he was useful.

  He shrugged his slender shoulders. “Step in my or-fice, then.”

  “I need your lads here in the Green for a week or so, if you’re willing,” the Guv continued. “A girl has gone missing, a West End girl, and we believe slavers are about.”

  “Got it. Anyfing in p’tic’ler we’se lookin’ for?”

  Barker showed him the photograph. “The young lady and any signs of white slavery. Keep a watch on her father, who will be searching for his daughter on a gray horse. Oh, and I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to watch our backs as well.”

  “It’ll cost you,” Vic warned. “Yer talkin’ an even dozen.”

  “Then it will cost me,” Barker said philosophically.

  “Right. I’ll get on it. ’Night, sir. ’Night, Ugly.”

  The latter was for my benefit. Someday he would be eighteen years of age and I was going to treat myself to a hard one right on the point of his chin. I’d half a mind to take a leaf from Barker’s book and consider him an adult already.

  We plodded along through the gaslit streets. The few lamps had been put here as a deterrent to crime, but this only pushed it into the dark alleyways on either side. The faces of the few people we passed were sunk in the shadow of their hats, save for the chalky white tips of their noses. Everyone was anonymous, which was good for the criminals and bad for the solitary bobby trying to protect people on his beat.

  By eleven o’clock I had run out of energy and was going on sheer endurance. I toddled along beside my employer, trying to keep my eyes open. It was a bad feeling to know that for all our efforts, we had failed to locate Gwendolyn DeVere. Failure is not a word Cyrus Barker takes lightly.

  When the Bow bells finally rang twelve, I nearly fell to the pavement. We had paced these streets for over ten hours.

  “Right,” Barker said with finality. “Let us find a cab, then.”

  His harsh whistle summoning a cab to Mile End Road was the sweetest sound I had heard all evening. I scrambled up into the cab when it arrived and propped myself in the corner. I would need all the sleep I could get; knowing Barker, we would start all the earlier in the morning. I let the steady clop and jingle of the horse, taking us away from this terrible district, lull me to sleep, a London lullaby.

  4

  THE NEXT MORNING I WAS DOWN IN THE KITCHEN having a pain au chocolat and a cup of coffee while waiting for our chef, Etienne, to prepare my omelet. I was still half asleep and ruminating on how different life was here from the harsh reality of Bethnal Green, but a mile away. Then out in the garden I saw that Barker’s ward, Bok Fu Ying, had arrived and was speaking with her guardian while in the act of attaching a leash to Harm’s collar. My employer’s dog was rarely leashed. Washing down the last of the bun with my coffee, I went out the back door to see what was going on.

  “Where is he going?” I asked, for it was obvious she was taking him somewhere.

  “We are going to Yorkshire, where he have union with a lady Pekingese,” she explained. As always, the girl wore a jet-black mourning dress and a heavy veil.

  “It is time to go to the office, Thomas,” Barker said. He tries to curtail any conversation between us, claiming that I am susceptible to female charms. I wished her and her charge a safe journey and followed my employer.

  A note was waiting upon our arrival at Whitehall. There was now a telephone set in Scotland Yard, but old habits die hard. Barker took the message from the salver Jenkins presented and read it.

  “A child’s body has been found in the sewers of Bethnal Green,” he announced. “We had better look into it. Come.”

  The day had started badly and was getting steadily worse. I had not yet prepared myself to see a corpse. Viewing corpses was one of my least-favorite parts of private enquiry work. Children are like fireworks, energy bursting forth in every direction. To see one lying still, never to rise again, is hard. I am no sentimentalist, but if they, with all their energy, can be brought so low, what hope is there for the rest of us?

  “How did Scotland Yard know we are investigating Miss DeVere’s disappearance?” I asked.

  “I rang Terry Poole last night, but it looks like Swanson’s handling the case.”

  In Grafton Street, a grate had been pulled out of the gutter and a tall ladder set at an angle in the hole. A constable guarded the ladder as if all Bethnal Green were waiting for him to leave so they could steal it. Barker identified himself and was just about to take hold of it when a head popped out of the hole like a badger from its sett, and soon a pair of wide shoulders squeezed out of it as well.

  “Barker,” the man stated in greeting. He wore a tan mackintosh, with greasy spots where it had rubbed against tunnel walls, and a bowler hat. He and the Guv were of like size and shape. He even had the same Scottish accent, but that was not surprising. Detective work, both public and private, was an occupation that seemed to attract Scots. In fact, so many were in Scotland Yard that some jested they had taken up the work when the Scottish kings the street was named for had died out.

  “Swanson,” Barker responded. “Bad business, this. Is it Gwendolyn DeVere, do you think?”

  “That’s for the coroner to decide. I’m just here to drag out the body and fill out the forms.”

  “Who found the body?” my employer asked.

  “A lunger, crawling after pennies and such in the sewers. Thought it was old clothes when she first came upon it. Her scream must’ve echoed for miles through the tunnels. You after having a gander?”

  “I’ve seen both sewers and dead bodies before, unless there is something else of interest.”

  The inspector gave a grim smile. “Not unless you are a connoisseur of sewer pipe.”

  “The body, man. Tell me about the body.”

  “I’ve got two men bringing it up in a tarp. She’s a’most the right size as the DeVere girl, but, no, it ain’t her. The body is too decomposed. Must’ve been down there a fortnight, at least.”

  We stepped back as the first constable’s helmet appeared out of the hole. The second constable was pale as death and wobbly on the ladder. They set the burden down on the pavement and moved away. Without preamble, Barker lifted the tarp. The little face inside was bloated, the eyes swollen, the mouth set in a rictus. The stench of decay hit me then, and the hand of the grave clutched me about the throat. For a second, I thought I would be ill. But the feeling passed, which in itself was alarming. How dulled was my soul becoming to this work?

  Cyr
us Barker removed his hat and then gently laid a hand upon the little corpse. Inspector Swanson and I watched his lips move in prayer, and in unison we removed our own bowlers. Then slowly the Guv shook his head.

  “I’m sorry ’twas not the child you were searching for, Cyrus.”

  “Perhaps it’s a blessing, Donald, and the girl lives yet. You’ll send word after the postmortem, will you not?”

  “Aye, I will.” Swanson turned his head, looking between the two of us. “Oh, bloody hell,” he muttered. “This is just what I need. Here comes Stead.”

  “The newspaper editor?” Barker asked.

  “The gadfly, you mean. The commissioner would rather have him behind bars than any criminal alive. No photographs, Stead!”

  I dared glance over my shoulder. Stead was young for the editor of a newspaper as widely subscribed to as the Pall Mall Gazette, not yet forty, I should say. He was of average build, with curly hair and a short, thick beard, and he looked a perfect fireball of energy. He had been directing a young companion to set up a large tripod and camera. Stead had been the first to print photographs of people in his newspaper but had raised the ire of the British government a number of times. Surely, he could never put such a tragic sight as this corpse into his newspaper.

  “What have we here, then?” he said, skirting Barker and bending over the body. “Oh, my word, it is a child. Who could have done such a thing? Do you know how she died, Swanson?”