[The Victorian Detectives 08] - Fame & Fortune

by Carol Hedges

  “I do not think we are looking for a man on the run,” Cully says. “Nor even someone who has gone to ground. He has left too many personal possessions. Unless he has sold the little carvings, and has absconded with the profits.”

  Greig takes the notebook and turns to the back. “Now, this is most interesting,” he says thoughtfully. “Our man seems to have liked a flutter. Here is a long list of bets. Small amounts but noted quite regularly. If this last entry is anything to go by, our man owed a considerable amount of money to somebody.”

  “I wonder whether it is related to his absence?” Cully muses. “Perhaps here is the motive for his theft?”

  Greig’s face indicates that he has something else he wishes to communicate, but before he can divulge what is on his mind, they hear the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stairs to the accompaniment of wheezing. They turn round. A wide, squat woman in a print dress and a large cap stands in the doorway, her meaty arms folded. The small hunchback child peers anxiously round her ample aproned form.

  “Ho yus?” the woman says. “Breaking and entering ~ caught red-handed too. Before I calls the police, who the devil are you?”

  ****

  Robertson, the police surgeon, is just putting away his various surgical implements when Detective Inspector Lachlan Greig enters the cold white-washed mortuary. Robertson favours him with his usual quizzical one-raised-eyebrow look. The look he reserves for members of the detective division, and any other officers of the Metropolitan Police who did not have specific medical training.

  “Detective Inspector Greig?” he says, snapping shut the velvet-lined case that contained his surgical saw. “I confess I was not anticipating a visit from any of you at this juncture.”

  Greig agrees that this may well be so, but that he has a member of the public in the main building, to whom he would like to show the clothes of the man found hanging from a bridge.

  “The person in question has a lodger of a similar age and description, who has not been seen for two nights in a row,” Greig tells him. “It is just a hunch, but worth pursuing.”

  Robertson gives him a narrow-eyed look, then hands over a bundle of clothing.

  “These are what the gentleman was wearing when he was brought in. Please return them after your so-called ‘hunch’ has been proven, or not.”

  Greig carries the bundle back to the main building, where the redoubtable landlady, who has been pacified and quite won over by the tall Scottish detective’s charm, identifies them as belonging to her former lodger Mr. James Flashley, after which Cully escorts the landlady back home, saying he will call in on Mr. Daubney and inform him of the fate of his manservant. Meanwhile, Greig takes the clothes back to the police surgeon, along with the name of the dead man.

  “Ah, I see,” Robertson says. “A successful hunch, then. Thank you, Detective Inspector Greig. It is always good to have a name for the unfortunate individuals who end up on the police mortuary slab. I will now complete my report, which I shall submit to Detective Inspector Stride tomorrow without fail. I bid you good evening.”

  Detective Inspector Greig is in a suitably pensive frame of mind as he makes his way back to his lodgings. The connection that he suspected between the absent manservant and the all-too present body in the police morgue has now been proven correct. It is the same individual. But for the rest?

  He remembers his old boss in Leith telling him about the five W’s: who, what, where, when, why. Once you can answer each of them, he’d said, you have the case solved. Greig thinks he can probably answer three. The identity of who was in charge of the rope, and why it ended up round the neck of the murdered manservant, however, still remains to be discovered.

  ****

  The district of Bloomsbury has a reputation as the intellectual and cultural centre of the city. The British Museum, that treasure-store of the world’s antiquities and curiosities, lies at its heart. Writers, architects, poets, lawyers and educational reformers make their homes in the great tranquil squares, set about with umbrageous plane trees. It is said that Bloomsbury is like the quiet quarter of a country town, set in the midst of the roaring sounds and smells of the greatest city on earth.

  Situated between Bernard Street and Guildford Street is one of the odder nooks in its desired WC postal district code. It is known as the Colonnade, and consists of a cobbled passageway, stables, and rather down-at-heel terraced houses, fronted by the structure that gives it its name.

  This is where many small tradesmen live and work, some in shops on site, others leaving each day to work in larger factories and stores. Here are tailors, mantua-makers, shabby beer-shops, shoe-makers, dressmakers, the elderly woman who sews pleated fronts for pianofortes and at the far end, over a confectioner’s, the dolls’ house furniture workshop that employs ten-year old Izzy Harding.

  The room where Izzy works is full of long tables at which the workers, mostly small girls, sit all day. Some paint tiny Louis XVI chairs and tables in gold paint. Others assemble and glue small wardrobes, dressing tables, dining sets, and kitchen dressers. None of the children have ever played with a dolls’ house, let alone a doll. For most of them, play is an alien concept. As is furniture.

  Having little hands is an advantage in this profession, likewise an ability to work accurately and at speed. The orders come streaming in from the big department stores. The overseer, herself not more than fourteen years old, but already a hardened entrepreneur, patrols the room constantly, checking the quality of workmanship, chastising those who slack off.

  At noon, when the bells of the city chime the hour, the youthful overseer (her name is Kate) claps her hands and shouts “dinnertime”, the signal for a general shuffling of feet, a scraping of boots on the wooden floor, and the noise of benches being pushed back.

  Those lucky enough to have something to eat produce heels of hard cheese, pieces of bread and scraps of meat from various pockets and proceed to munch hungrily. For the rest, it is a chance to get their heads down and snatch a few minutes’ welcome respite.

  Izzy Harding swings her legs over her bench and goes towards the attic window, picking up a stool on her way. She is undersized for her age, with a face that might blossom into prettiness at a later stage. Now, her eyes are too big and hungry, her cheekbones too near the surface for beauty.

  She climbs onto the stool and lifts her face to peer out. Birds swoop to and fro in the leaden-coloured sky. Smoke rises from chimneys, forming strange ghostly shapes in the air. A shaft of dust-laden sunshine lights up the planes of her small cat-like face with its pale hair and sea-green eyes that catch and hold the light.

  If she stands on tiptoe and looks down, Izzy can see the top of a straggly tree, just beginning to shed its leaves. If she looks further afield, she sees the roof and top floor windows of a house in one of the grand gated squares, where poor people like her are forbidden to go. She can hear carriages, horses, the sounds of construction.

  Izzy sucks the end of her ragged sleeve. It is not exactly nutritious, but better than nothing. She has brought no food to eat and supper is a long way into the future ~ if her vagabonding mother has remembered to buy anything. She doesn’t hold out much hope.

  The church bells ring the half-hour. The end of dinner-break. Heads are raised wearily from folded arms. The last morsels of food are stuffed into mouths. The workers return to their places. Izzy picks up her paintbrush, dips it into her pot of lacquer, and embarks on the line of miniscule cabinets that arrive in a steady stream from the assemblers and gluers at the other end of the table.

  All afternoon she toils, the smell of the lacquer making her feel sick. It is the colour of treacle. But it isn’t treacle. If it was, she’d probably have eaten the pot, even though she has no bread to go with it. Every now and then a man arrives and delivers more boxes of furniture to be assembled and painted. It is autumn, and the miniature housing market is buoyant.

  Eventually, as the light begins to fade, the overseer rises. She goes to the top table and
stands with her arms folded. The sign that work is finished for the day. Izzy screws the top back onto the varnish bottle and wipes her hands on her pinafore.

  All around her, children are packing tiny furniture into boxes. Two older boys get brooms and begin sweeping the floorboards. Once everything has been tidied to the standard required, the overseer digs out a key from her pocket. The attic door is unlocked, and a steady stream of small pattering footsteps descend the stairs to street level.

  Izzy Harding waves farewell to her co-workers. Then she ducks round the side of the building, scurries down a back alleyway, crosses several filth-ridden courts, finally entering a passageway so narrow that an adult has to turn sideways. At the end of the passageway is a small door. She pushes it open and enters a large, hot kitchen full of steam, pans frying, pots bubbling and people in filthy cooks’ aprons shouting at each other over the noise.

  This is the kitchen of Mrs Sarah McAdam’s Select City Dining Room, which caters for the needs of the thousands of clerks who spend all day seated on high stools in dimly lit rooms, entering columns of figures into ledgers. At the end of the day, all they require are big plates of hot dinners served speedily and cheaply. Two nights a week, in the Victorian equivalent of the gig economy, Izzy Harding washes the plates.

  As Izzy slides into the room, one of the cooks looks up from the huge pot of potatoes boiling away on the range, shouts, “Oi, you’re late!” and throws a ladle at her head. Izzy ducks. She pulls out a box from under the butler sink, steps onto it, picks up the first greasy plate from the pile on the draining board, and sluices it under the cold tap.

  This is her second job. For the next few hours she will wash dirty plates and cutlery and keep her head down. It is as boring and repetitive as painting dolls’ house furniture. But it has one overwhelming advantage to the day job: it comes with food.

  The meat bones, with their tassels of fat and gristle, are put straight into a large simmering stock pot on the side of the stove. But every now and then, when nobody is watching, Izzy will creep over with her box, and surreptitiously siphon off some of the liquid using the cracked cup she hides underneath it. At the end of her shift, Izzy gets paid in leftover bread, which she will cram as soon as she leaves the premises.

  It will be dark by the time she finishes. She will make her way back through unlit alleys and foot-streets, occasionally almost tripping over a rat. The rats don’t bother her though. In London, a person is never far from a rat. In one form or another.

  Tonight, when Izzy gets in, she is going to be informed by Mrs Bridget O’Shaughnessy (widow, washerwoman and mother of five), who rents the first floor back of a dismal tenement and then sublets portions of the floor to make ends meet, that the rent is owing and her ‘Ma’ hasn’t paid it.

  Izzy keeps a small secret stash of coins hidden in her mattress, along with her other treasures: a shiny brass button, a length of bright scarlet ribbon she found in the street, a sheet of gold leaf, six farthings and a miniature dolls’ tea-set, streaky-painted and deemed therefore to be too inferior to be sold. These are the only things she truly owns in the world.

  Reluctantly, she’ll dig out the rent money and pay her landlady, who mutters, as she always does on occasions like this something about ‘shurely that craiture like yer Ma doesn’t deserve a good childer like you’ as she drops the coins into her apron pocket. Too exhausted to worry about her absent parent, Izzy will lie down on the thin mattress on the floor, with her boots still on, and fall instantly asleep.

  ****

  Maria Barklem does not like to describe what she does as charity. Charity, in her experience, comes in the form of stern-faced Christian ladies with condemnatory expressions. Charity sits in cold committee rooms and hides itself under worthy names, while doling out its meagre largesse with reluctant parsimony.

  Maria Barklem has experienced enough charity throughout her life to recognise it for what it is, and to have nothing to do with it. She remembers, oh so vividly, the hand-me-down clothes that her mother would be given by the ‘Society of Charitable Providers of Clothes for the Children of the Indigenous Poor & Worthy Clergy’. Dresses that were faded from too many washes, and discoloured under the armpits, coats with unmatching buttons, boots that were scuffed and thin-soled, but suitable for the child of a poor vicar.

  Then there were the ‘Coals and Batter Puddings’ women, who used to turn up periodically with covered basins and bags. They always wanted to check that the family were actually deserving of their gifts, poking around the tiny grace and favour cottage on the edge of the graveyard, checking the pantry for any suspicious evidence of food that would mean the gifts would be summarily withdrawn.

  Thus, Maria has grown into a slender, dark-haired young woman with a pointed chin and a habit of staring at the world as if daring it to take her on. Her bonnet might be last year’s model, her dress unfashionable in cut and colour, but she is determined to do something important with her life. The decision has been forged upon the rocks of much childhood humiliation.

  Part of this determination has resulted in Maria enrolling herself at the Working Women’s College in Queen Square, where she attends evening lectures, along with 200 other women. They are an eclectic mix of working women: dressmakers, barmaids, milliners, servants, and shop-workers like herself. Some of the students come from as far afield as Pimlico! Maria is currently learning Latin and mathematics and thinking about becoming a qualified teacher.

  The bells of the local churches are in some disagreement about the exact moment when six o’clock arrives as Maria lets herself out of a small local baker and confectioner shop. She takes a key from her pocket and locks the door. She leaves behind an empty shop, still smelling enticingly of baking, though all the shelves are empty save for an elaborate plaster wedding cake in the front window.

  Maria makes her way back home. Arriving on the doorstep, she is greeted by a collection of dishevelled children, who eye the cloth bag she is carrying with bright hopeful eyes. Maria smiles at them, makes a rapid head count, purses her lips for a second, then leads them to the back of the cottage, where she unlocks the kitchen door.

  “Just teaching my class, Mother,” she calls up the stairs. A faint reply comes floating back. Maria ushers the motley crowd into the kitchen, where they distribute themselves round the scrubbed deal table, emitting a variety of smells and odours as they make themselves comfortable.

  She takes some battered slates and a packet of chalk from the kitchen drawer and distributes them amongst the scholars. Then she opens the cloth bag and removes a half-loaf of coarse bread. The scholars fix their eyes upon it. Maria fetches a plate and breaks the loaf into pieces.

  “Now then,” she says, “who can tell me what letter of the alphabet begins the word bread?”

  A forest of hands.

  “Alfie?”

  “B! Innit, miss?”

  “Quite correct,” Maria says, passing him a piece. The child stuffs it into his mouth and chews ravenously.

  By the time the word BREAD has been spelled, the actual item has been shared out and devoured. The words PIECE and GONE follow in quick succession. When nothing remains, not even a CRUMB, Maria passes on to elementary maths, using buttons from an old tin box that belonged to her mother. The scholars scratch their heads as they deduct or add buttons and work out the answers on their slates.

  Time passes. The class is on their final exercise of the evening ~ sharing stories of their day, when a timid knock is heard on the kitchen door. Maria hurries to open it, her face lighting up when she sees the diminutive figure of Izzy Harding standing on the step.

  “Oh Izzy, there you are!” she exclaims. “I wondered where you’d got to this evening. It isn’t like you to miss your lessons.”

  Muttering an apology, Izzy Harding sidles into the room, shucking off her battered hat and coat. She slides onto the end of a bench, picks up a stick of chalk and a slate, and laboriously writes her name at the top. The others watch her curiously and in silence.<
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  After a few minutes of scratching, Izzy looks up. She sets down the chalk and hands the slate to Maria, who reads:

  Sory I was lat. Ma had a hedake.

  Resisting the urge to apply corrections, Maria hands back the slate without comment. She can read between the lines and behind the spelling. Izzy wipes off the words with her sleeve. The lesson stutters to a halt. The scholars pile up their slates, hand over their chalk (with the exception of a lumpen-faced boy called Jonny Farringer, who has eaten his) and file out of the kitchen door.

  Maria watches their ragged shuffle back towards the street. It saddens her that Izzy Harding, the brightest and best of the class, has not been able to share in the food, but she knows better than to keep her back. Any sign of favouritism will be noted and begrudged. Her mission is to teach the rudiments of reading and writing, not to dispense charity to a select few.

  She sets the kettle onto the stove, and prepares the simple supper that will sustain her invalid mother and herself. Maria wonders whether her best and most able pupil will eat tonight. She suspects not. One day, she promises herself, when she has her own school, things will be different for children like Izzy Harding. In the meantime, she will continue to do what she can to help them get along.

  ****

  Bright and early next morning, Detective Inspector Stride arrives at Scotland Yard, refreshed by a mug of morning coffee purchased from his usual stallholders, who have reappeared on the corner of the piazza after a mysterious absence.

  He enters the outer office, where a small group of last night’s drunks are being processed by the desk constable before being released into society to become tonight’s drunks. He progresses through to his office, noting that a selection of the morning papers has been placed upon his desk. Atop of them sits the autopsy report on James Flashley, late valet to Gerald Daubney, collector of small wooden Japanese carvings.