by Jim Eldridge
Now Jackley hobbled around on two crutches on the rare occasions when he left home.
If you’re going to build an empire, someone has to suffer: that was Carr’s credo.
A movement in the yard below caught his eye. One of his minions, Foxy Wood, had come in through the gates and was making for the wooden stairs that led to Carr’s quarters. One of Carr’s bodyguards stepped forward, shotgun at the ready, and stopped Foxy. That was one of Carr’s rules. Even if you know them, stop them and ask them what they want. Otherwise, one day someone who might be thought of as a friend could well stroll in and attack him. Foxy opened his jacket at the bodyguard’s orders and let himself be searched for weapons. When all was clear he was allowed to continue on his way.
Carr sat and waited for Foxy to appear. ‘This is unexpected, Foxy. Do you have news of anything out there?’
‘Out there’ was everywhere beyond the yard in Somers Town and Carr had a network of people who kept their eyes and ears open with orders to report anything of interest to him. Power came from knowledge, especially knowledge about people.
‘I do,’ said Foxy. ‘I saw something interesting today, Mr Carr.’
‘Go on?’
‘You know that Mrs Dixon? The one with the big house in Lowndes Square?’
Carr nodded.
‘Well, I was watching it, like you told me, and you’ll never guess who went in to see her.’
‘Who?’
‘Them couple they call the Museum Detectives. You know, that bloke who used to be on Abberline’s squad, Daniel Wilson, before he went private. And that woman, Fenton.’
‘Abigail Fenton,’ said Carr.
‘That’s her.’
‘And they were let in?’
Foxy nodded. ‘And they were in there for a while. Long enough to chat, anyway.’
‘What happened after?’
‘I dunno, Mr Carr. They just left. I stayed where I was, watching the house.’
‘Did the Dixon woman come out afterwards and go off anywhere?’
Foxy shook his head. ‘No. No one come out.’
Carr looked thoughtful. ‘That’s not good,’ he said at last.
‘What do you want done, Mr Carr?’
‘Let me think about it.’ He produced a silver coin, which he slid across the desk towards Foxy, who picked it up with a grateful nod, and then left.
So, the Museum Detectives and Mrs Dixon. This needed to be dealt with before it became bigger than it should.
The Lady sat at her workbench, delicately applying paint to the wax head on its stand. This was the part she most enjoyed, adding the flesh tones that were so realistic the head seemed to come to life. This was what she had learnt at Tussauds, the technique handed down through generations: the tints on the cheekbones and the ears, the shadows beneath the eyebrows, the gradation of darkness into the nostrils so that they seemed be inhaling air. Lesser wax artists simply used a general dark brown inside the cavities, but the colouring techniques she’d learnt from her days at Tussauds made her work – like this head – live, the personality of the original shining through.
There was a gentle tap at the door of her studio, and at her call of ‘Come!’ Ralph, her prime henchman, entered.
‘Pardon me for interrupting, my lady,’ he said, ‘but we’ve located Harry Michaels.’
‘Where?’ she asked.
‘He’s hiding out in Wembley.’
She stopped her work with the delicate paintbrush and nodded. ‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘Bring him to me.’
John Feather’s visit to the small terraced house in Camden Town where Fred Calley lived found the injured police inspector sitting on a wooden chair, his right leg in plaster from ankle to the knee, propped up on a wooden stool in his small backyard, which housed the handful of chickens that kept him and his family provided with eggs.
‘John!’ Calley beamed. ‘Good to see you! Fancy a cup of tea? Or I’ve got a beer.’
‘Tea would be nice,’ said Feather.
‘Betty!’ called Calley. When his wife appeared from the scullery he said, ‘Can you put the kettle on for a brew, please, dear?’
Betty nodded and disappeared back into the house.
‘Poor Betty,’ sighed Calley. ‘She has to do everything since I’ve been laid up with me leg. Bring the coal in. Chop the wood for the fire. Look after the chickens. All the things I used to do, as well as her own.’
Feather looked at the four brown hens that scratched at a small patch of earth next to the small knocked-together hut where they roosted at night.
‘How is the leg?’ he asked.
‘It itches,’ said Calley. ‘The doc says that shows it’s getting better.’ He indicated for Feather to sit on the upturned beer crate beside him, and asked, ‘So, how are you getting on with the bank jobs? I hear there was another one last night.’ He grinned. ‘I keep up with what’s happening. The local beat copper usually drops in late morning for a cuppa and to catch me up with what’s going on. He told me about the Belgravia hit.’
‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. There were three you investigated before you broke your leg.’
‘That’s right.’ Calley nodded.
‘Did any of them involve the bank having especially large sums of money in the vault the night they were done? I’m asking because it seems the Belgravia one had a sizeable amount in, more than it usually might have had.’
Calley frowned thoughtfully. ‘Actually, I asked that very question at the first one that got done, but after they said no, I didn’t ask the next two. You’re thinking that someone inside the bank knew there’d be extra cash?’
‘It’s just a thought,’ said Feather. ‘I’ve got some suspicions about one of the bank clerks. He was particularly nervous and edgy when I talked to him and started asking questions.’
‘Seems like he might be worth hauling in, being given a proper going over. Questions only, of course. I didn’t mean …’
‘I know you didn’t, Fred.’ Feather smiled. ‘Beating a confession out of someone has never been your style nor mine.’
‘A pity the same can’t be said of all of our colleagues.’
‘Tea!’ announced Betty, appearing with two mugs. She looked at Feather and grinned. ‘I’m glad you’re here, John. It’s what he needs. Someone to talk to about policing.’
As she withdrew back to the house and Feather took a sip from his cup, he noticed that Calley seemed preoccupied.
‘You’ve just thought of something, Fred?’
‘I have,’ said Calley. ‘It was you saying about that edgy, nervous bank clerk. When I was talking to the clerks after the third robbery, at the Mayfair branch of Paget’s Mercantile, there was one of them who struck me as being a bit edgy. If I hadn’t had the accident, I’d have gone back to have another word with him, but breaking my leg like I did put everything else out of my head.’
‘Who was he?’ asked Feather. ‘This clerk?’
‘Derek Parminter,’ said Calley. ‘The name still sticks because of that feeling I had that something wasn’t right about him. He gave all the right answers to my questions, but there was something about his manner. Shifty.’
‘Derek Parminter at Paget’s Mercantile.’ Feather nodded. ‘Thanks, Fred. I’ll have a word with him, along with the one I had my doubts about at Billings.’
Inspector Jarrett sat glowering at the two men sitting opposite his desk: Donald Bruin and Steven Patterson. Sergeant Pick sat at one side, his notebook open in front of him, pencil poised, although the inspector had told him not to bother with actually taking any notes. ‘The sight of the notebook, knowing that everything they say will be taken down in writing, will be enough to intimidate them.’
‘Say they notice I’m not writing?’ asked Pick.
‘Pretend,’ said Jarrett. ‘Just wiggle your pencil about.’
The two men looked intimidated enough, just by being dragged into Scotland Yard.
‘Tell me why you came back to Tuss
auds museum,’ said Jarrett.
‘We already told that other bloke,’ said Bruin. ‘That other detective.’
‘What other detective?’ demanded Jarrett.
‘Wilson something,’ said Bruin.
‘Daniel Wilson?’
Patterson nodded.
Damn Wilson! thought Jarrett irritably. Aloud, he said, ‘Daniel Wilson is not a proper detective.’
‘He said he was,’ said Patterson.
‘No, he said he was a private detective,’ corrected Bruin. ‘Hired by Mr Tussaud.’
‘Oh yes, that’s right,’ said Patterson.
‘Tell me why you came back to Tussauds,’ repeated Jarrett.
‘Because we got kicked off the boat,’ said Bruin. ‘We had nowhere to live, no work and no money. We thought that Mr Tussaud might take us back. And he did.’
‘Why did you leave there in the first place?’
Once again, just as they’d done with Daniel, the two men told their tale: the offer of the job from Michaels, and Michaels paying the money they owed Gerald Carr.
‘So was this bloke Michaels working for Carr?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Bruin. ‘All we saw was him paying Carr the money we owed him.’
‘Because he wanted you to look after his barge.’
‘That’s right,’ said Bruin.
‘Only it turned out it wasn’t his barge,’ said Patterson. ‘He was only renting it from this other bloke, the one who really owned it. And Michaels had told this bloke his name was Stafford, not Michaels.’
‘Didn’t that strike you as suspicious?’ asked Jarrett.
‘Only once he’d told us about it, but that wasn’t until after he told us to get off his boat.’
‘And you’d never met the two blokes who took over from you as nightwatchmen at Tussauds? Eric Dudgeon and Walter Bagshot.’
Both men shook their heads.
‘We didn’t know anything about them, until Mr Tussaud told us they’d been murdered.’
‘At the museum!’ added Patterson, horrified. ‘That could have been us!’
‘Did you ever meet Louis Tussaud?’
The two men exchanged puzzled looks, then Patterson asked, ‘Who?’
‘Mr John Tussaud’s younger brother.’
‘No,’ said Bruin. ‘The only one of the family we met was Mr John. He was the boss.’
‘Did John Tussaud ever mention his brother?’
‘No,’ said Bruin. ‘At least, not to us. But then we never saw that much of him. He was there during the day, and we were there at night.’
‘Tell me about this bloke Michaels,’ said Jarrett. ‘What did he look like?’
As they had done with Daniel, the two men gave the inspector a description of Michaels, and this time Jarrett gestured to Pick to make notes of what they said.
‘And you’d never seen him before he approached you in the pub?’
‘No.’
Finally, after going over the same topics two or three times, and receiving the same answers from the two men each time, Jarrett reluctantly admitted to himself that they were a dead end. They’d just been pawns in someone else’s game, and that game seemed to have been played by Michaels – now disappeared – and Gerald Carr.
‘All right, you may go,’ he told them. ‘But for the moment. I may well want to talk to you again.’
He gestured for Pick to conduct them down to reception and out of the building, then sat in brooding silence, weighing up the facts as they were known so far. Two dead men and a man behind the plot gone missing. But what was the plot?
Sergeant Pick returned and looked at him questioningly.
‘What do you think, sir?’ he asked. ‘Think they had anything to do with the murders?’
‘No,’ grunted Jarrett sourly.
Pick suddenly spotted the piece of paper with Thomas Tandry’s details on it on the desk, and he picked it up.
‘Is this something, guv?’ he asked. ‘I see it mentions wax.’
Jarrett looked at it, then shook his head. ‘Some runaway kid. Whoever’s reported him missing is using the Tussaud murders to try and get us looking for him by claiming he might be involved.’
‘Involved in what way, sir?’
‘He was an apprentice at one of the wax museums.’
‘Tussauds?’
‘No, not Tussauds, otherwise we’d obviously be looking into it,’ snorted Jarrett irritably. ‘One of the other backstreet places where the figures look nothing like who they’re supposed to be. Like I say, it’s someone using this wax business to get us looking for him. If we go down that road we’ll be spending all our time looking for everyone who’s vanished just because they once worked in the wax trade. Candlemakers, and Lord alone knows who else.’
On Daniel and Abigail’s return to their home in Camden Town they found an envelope waiting on their doormat addressed to Miss Abigail Fenton in an ornate script.
‘An educated hand,’ commented Daniel.
Abigail opened it. ‘Well done, Detective,’ she said. ‘It’s from Mr Conan Doyle.’ She scanned it, then announced, ‘He invites me to have lunch with him at the Langham Hotel tomorrow to discuss the expedition.’ She shook her head. ‘He’s being pushy. I still haven’t told him I’ll definitely be going.’
‘I get the impression that being pushy is a core part of his character,’ commented Daniel. ‘It’s what makes him who he is, and why he’s been so successful.’
She looked at him, concerned.
‘Are you still of the same mind about me going?’ she asked, worried.
‘Yes,’ said Daniel. ‘I love you and will miss you, but I’ll be coming out to see you. As I’ve said before, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. To lead an expedition of your own.’
‘It’ll be Conan Doyle’s expedition,’ she said. ‘He’s putting up the money for it.’
‘But he won’t be the leader,’ said Daniel. ‘The expeditions to Hawara you went on with Flinders Petrie were funded by Jesse Haworth, but they were known as the Petrie expeditions, not Haworth.’ He took her in his arms and looked earnestly into her eyes. ‘I know you love me, I never doubt that, but this is something that you have to do, for the other half of you that is Abigail Fenton. The world-renowned archaeologist.’
‘I’m not world-renowned,’ she corrected him.
‘You will be after this,’ said Daniel.
Police Constable Charlie Gordon strolled down Lower Regent Street towards Piccadilly Circus. It was one in the morning. Many of his colleagues didn’t like walking the beat in the middle of the night, but for Charlie, this part of London was different from most other beats. For one thing there was far less traffic; you could cross the road far more safely than during the day, when the horse-drawn vehicles packed the streets and there was always the danger of a horse getting spooked and kicking out. And unlike other areas, here there were always people around in the early hours. Not as many as during the day, but still, they were around. Most of them he knew by sight. They were the Night People, prostitutes who served in the local brothels, of which there were many, or used a darkened alley for a quick service. Gamblers who frequented the late-night gambling clubs in Soho. Actors and theatre staff heading home after a stint at one of the many theatres in the area. Waifs and strays who took refuge in shop doorways. It was one of these waifs and strays, a small boy he only knew as Arch, who ran towards him as he neared the Circus.
‘Mr Gordon!’ shouted Arch. ‘There’s a bloke who looks dead down by Eros.’
‘Dead? Don’t you mean dead drunk?’ asked Gordon.
The little boy shook his head. ‘I know drunks. They stink of drink. This bloke don’t.’
Gordon quickened his step and hurried towards the fountain and the statue of Eros, bow and arrow in the god’s outstretched arms, that topped it. As Arch had reported, a man was sitting on the pavement at the base of the fountain, his eyes and mouth open, and he seemed to be staring fixedly at something on the other side of the
road. Automatically, Gordon shot a look in that direction. Greville’s wax museum, now closed for the night, its windows and doorway dark. He turned his attention back to the man, checking for a pulse. None. The man was definitely dead, and looked as if he’d been dead for a while. Gordon saw that there was something white inside the man’s open mouth. Puzzled, he tentatively pushed the tip of his finger into the man’s mouth and his finger poked against some chalk-like powdery substance. He took his finger out examined the white powder now staining the end of his finger.
‘What’s that, Mr Gordon?’ asked Arch.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Gordon. ‘I’ll need to get it checked. But it looks to me like this bloke’s had plaster of Paris stuffed down his throat.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Inspector Jarrett and Sergeant Pick stood in the mortuary in the basement of Scotland Yard, watching as Donald Bruin and Steven Patterson studied the dead body of the man laid out on the mortuary table.
‘Well?’ demanded Jarrett.
Bruin turned to him and nodded. ‘Yes, that’s him,’ he said. ‘That’s Mr Michaels, the bloke we told you about yesterday. What’s happened to him?’
‘We’ll know when the medico has a chance to get to work on him,’ said Jarrett. ‘Is there any more you can tell me about him?’
‘Nothing more than we told you yesterday,’ said Bruin.
Jarrett nodded. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You can go. We know where you are if we need you.’ He turned to Pick. ‘Sergeant, please escort them out.’
As Pick left the room with Bruin and Patterson, Jarrett turned back to look at the corpse. Plaster of Paris poured down the bloke’s throat then left to harden, suffocating him, the medic reckoned, though he’d know more once he opened him up.
As soon as Jarrett had arrived for work that morning, he’d been told about the dead body that had been discovered by Eros in Piccadilly Circus. The sight of the dead man tallied with the description the two watchmen had given of Michaels when he’d brought them in for questioning the previous day. He’d sent Pick to bring them back in and now had confirmation. Michaels, the man who’d set up the scam in order to get Dudgeon and Bagshot into the wax museum, was also now dead. But why plaster of Paris?