Avery & Blake 02 - The Infidel Stain (5 page)

Mr Threlfall tried to look at his sleeve while pretending not to – it was indeed soaked in something thick and stew-like – reddened, picked up his case and stomped from the room. We heard his boots clattering crossly down the stairs.

‘Fire and fury!’ I said, laughing despite myself. ‘He deserved it, but was it a good idea to so provoke him?’

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Blake, looking moodily after him. ‘You don’t have to do this, Avery,’ he added.

‘Allington asked for me. Why should I not stay? I’ve a mind for it – it beats drilling the South Devon militia, believe me. And you need me. Look at you: you are in no state to work on your own.’

‘You said yourself you’ve no experience in such things,’ he retorted. ‘What can you do round the back of Drury Lane or Monmouth Street in your fine frock-coat but get yourself sharped or buy a cheap whore?’

‘Oh, Jeremiah, you have become coarse in your old age.’

‘I was always coarse, you just didn’t understand because I was speaking Hindoostanee. Besides, this thing, it’s impossible. The bodies will have been buried long since, there will be next to nothing to find.’

‘You did not refuse it.’

‘I’ve nothing better to do.’

I, too
, I thought.

We passed down the stairs in silence. At last Blake turned to me and said, ‘
Master of disguise?
’

‘Why not?’ I said, and I laughed.

I felt my melancholy start to lift for the first time in months.

On the train back to Tower Hill, Blake took the leather portfolio from my lap and began to flick through the papers, as I stared, fascinated, out of the window.

‘Is there much to read?’ I said at last.

‘Police report of death of Nathaniel Wedderburn, printer, aged forty-two. Lived above his shop with his wife and five children. Thirty-six Holywell Street, Holborn. Description of body. No sign of forced entry. No sign of a struggle in the room. No murder weapon. No one saw anything. Body found by a young girl, Matty Horner. No relation to the deceased. A coroner’s report. A statement from a Thomas Dearlove of the London City Mission and the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, describing how he saw the body shortly after it was found.’

‘The “ragged school” teacher?’

‘Should think so.’

‘And the other dead man?’

‘Even less on him. Matthew Blundell, printer, Monmouth Street, Seven Dials. A police report from six weeks back, saying the body was discovered in the premises after a fire. No witnesses. Another letter from Dearlove dated two weeks ago, addressed to His Lordship, saying that he had heard word of another murdered printer in Monmouth Street. He says that the body was discovered by neighbours, and had been stabbed and left on his press just as Wedderburn was, but that the place caught fire not long after the body was discovered. Someone brought a candle into the shop and the room combusted. Several burned, but no one seriously.’

‘How shall we proceed?’ I asked.

‘We will do our best to build a picture of Wedderburn and his associates. See if he knew Blundell. Find this Dearlove. Follow what threads we can.’ He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. He
looked suddenly weary. ‘This kind of murder, it’s rare. But when someone goes so far as to arrange bodies in such an elaborate way, rational thought, logical connections, usual motives,’ he shook his head, ‘more often than not, they do not apply. Whoever has done this has a kind of sickness of the soul. But one that is not necessarily in plain view.’

‘You have seen something like it before?’

He nodded and clamped his mouth shut. I saw he would say no more on the matter. ‘Still,’ he relented, ‘we’ll go to Holywell Street. Ask the questions. See what we can find out.’

At Tower Hill I looked up from retrieving my ticket for the inspector to find Blake on the other side of the shed, gazing at the black steam engine attached to the huge metal cable which stretched all the way to the wagons we had travelled upon, snaking around them and up the track itself.

‘You take an interest in steam engines, Blake?’ I said, surprised.

‘Never seen one of these – the engine’s stationary and the cable draws the wagons along the track.’

‘It seems to me as if the whole world has changed since I left England.’

‘Not yet, but it will. The railways’ll be everywhere. Devon too.’

On Great Tower Street we spied an omnibus caught in the traffic like a fly in honey. I had always longed to travel in one. With an air of worldly resignation Blake gestured me on, and I hauled myself in by the leather strap. There was at once an overwhelming and uncitified smell of wet horse and old straw, and I had to pack myself in, my knees knocking over-intimately against those of passengers opposite us, my feet deep in the straw. The omnibus itself was equally trapped in a sea of coaches, donkey carts, carriages, horses, squeaking brakes and rattling wheels, all striking out in different directions. As we snailed west, I fell to daydreaming, marvelling that the last time I had seen the man next to me, we had stood in the warmth of an Indian spring on the banks of the Hooghly River, watching the clippers sailing past. The passengers’ faces – cross, musing, fatigued, dazed – changed and rearranged themselves, and our trousers grew increasingly muddied as ladies dragged their wet
skirts over them, fighting their way on and off. In Devon I would have worn gaiters to weather the mud; in the city it was not done, but the place was quite as muddy. By the time we reached our destination, we might have walked the distance in half the time. And when we were discharged from the ’bus, we were, I saw, on the far side of the old Temple Bar.

‘I was here yesterday,’ I said.

‘Holywell Street is off the Strand,’ Blake said. ‘There you’ll find the similarity ends.’ He strode through the archway, heading north, his pace exposing a very slight limp. There was a gust of chill air. I shivered.

‘Cold still catch you out?’ he said.

I nodded, gasped, and pulled my coat about me.

‘Me too,’ he said.

Holywell Street was a bedraggled mishmash of battered old and ugly new, with a distinctly disreputable, even sinister air. Blake fitted in perfectly. Dreary flat-fronted tenements alternated with timbered houses so bent, mended and patched it was a wonder they stood at all. As it was, the whole street gave the impression that at an antique moment before the flood some great geological pressure had squeezed it, forcing it all upright; some premises had emerged barely wide enough to fit a front door; others had walls warped and curved like crooked old men. The oldest buildings leant forward so far over the street that it seemed a miracle they had not yet toppled into it.

It was busy. Street sellers offered coffee, hot potatoes, sandwiches and the like. A young girl sold winter cress. A couple of patterers hawked ballads and stories and love letters allegedly sent by famous aristocrats to lowly seamstresses. A few painted creatures stood about in bright, cheap dresses, with plaid shawls that only half hid their low necklines. Further away a couple of small boys were dancing to a barrel organ. A no-less-ramshackle company observed the wares: clerks taking coffee, idlers in caps and cord breeches leaning against walls encrusted with advertising bills, and pimply boys staring at the whores and the shop windows.

Above all, the street was lined with small run-down bookshops, print shops and sellers of second-hand clothes. Several had elaborate shop signs over their doors: above one were a huge grinning plaster mask and the words ‘Masquerade and Fancy Attire’; above another was a huge smiling half-moon. There was also a tavern; a couple of those ‘marine stores’ that sold a jumble of worn-out odds and ends; a barber’s; and a small brown shop, the tiny panes in its window darkened, that went by the legend ‘Letters Wrote’. Outside the shabby book and print shops were trestles on which were displayed their mostly disappointing, well-thumbed stock: old journals, torn sheet music, chapbooks and soiled penny bloods with lurid names:
Varney the Vampire
and
The Gallery of Terror
. The clothes dealers made a better show: their threadbare wares were displayed all down the street, hung on poles in front of their shops, a rainbow of dingy hues, with rows of shoes, implausibly blacked, below, set out like exotic piano keys.

We stopped at a shop whose window was strung with old beaver hats, bright neckties, and trousers and jackets with black-patched knees and elbows. Most looked as if a little soap and water would have improved them immeasurably. An old clothes seller sat immobile before it, lost in his pipe fumes.

‘I suppose this is where you acquire your wardrobe?’ I said to Blake.

‘I wouldn’t buy here, it’s three times the price of Rosemary Lane.’

‘
Rosemary Lane?
’ the old man sputtered, coming to life. He had a long, thin yellow face, a straggling pointy beard, and a black skullcap, denoting his Jewish faith, with a frizz of grey fuzz beneath it. He appeared to have concluded that the best way to exhibit his wares was to wear as many of them as possible at once: he had at least five layers on – greatcoat over frock-coat over several waistcoats, and his gnarled fingers emerged from two pairs of ragged fingerless gloves.‘
Rosemary Lane!
’ he said again. ‘I’ll have you know my clothes are a sight finer than them shreds. And my prices are very good, cheap, cheap, cheap. But quality too. See these?’ He stood up and pointed at a row of baggy-kneed trousers. ‘Bargains all. And what about a surcoat?’ He grabbed Blake’s coat and rubbed it between his
fingers, then pointed at something only very slightly less ragged. ‘You could do with something warmer. Twenty-two shillings.’ I grinned delightedly: he sounded like the cockney Sam Weller from
The Pickwick Papers
– or the pickpocket Fagin from
Oliver Twist
.

‘Twenty-two shillings?’ said Blake drily. ‘If I gave you half you’d be rolling me.’

‘Carn take it, sir, cost me a great deal more than that. See the sleeves, lovely work.’

Blake shook his head.

‘That’s a nice bit of levver too,’ the old man went on, glancing at the leather portfolio. ‘But what about the young gentleman?’ He gestured at me, then ran his hand caressingly along a row of brightly coloured squares. ‘You can never have too many handkerchiefs – here, a billy every one.’

I looked confused.

Blake said, ‘He claims they’re silk. Care to help me with something else, old man? Tell me where Nat Wedderburn’s shop is?’

At once the old man’s face closed like a door. ‘Carn help you with that,’ he said, and turned away abruptly.

The murdered man’s shop was almost opposite. It looked as if it had been closed not for three weeks but for many years. The window had been blacked out and already a few bills had been pasted over it. The sign, ‘Nathaniel Wedderburn, books and engravings’, with a pretty decoration of thorns and leaves in white, was very worn. It seemed to me that as they went past passers-by sped up and took care not to look at it, as if the grisly happenings that had come about within might cast a taint.

Blake knocked on the door.

‘Even if they are there, would we not be intruding upon their grief?’ I said.

‘You’ve a better notion?’ He knocked again.

‘Let us at least have Lord Allington’s letter to hand,’ I said, looking about nervously. On the other side of the road, the old clothes dealer eyed us balefully. From the portfolio I pulled out the envelope sealed with His Lordship’s arms and slipped it into my coat pocket.

The two boys with the barrel organ had followed us down the street and watched us from the gutter. Blake beckoned me close, and from a pocket in his rags brought out two thin iron tools – a piece of wire filament with a curved end; and a thicker, flat-headed implement – and quickly inserted them into his palms, tucking the ends up his cuffs.

‘Blake?’ I said doubtfully.

Shielding the keyhole and handle with his body, he pushed the thicker tool into the lock and gave it a hard downward yank, then slipped the wire filament in above it and twisted.

‘Blake!’

He turned the handle and the door opened smoothly. I swallowed my censure, wondered where he had learnt such skills, then followed after him, closing the door behind me.

It would have been hard to imagine a room more grimly empty. There was not a book or scrap of paper anywhere, just a layer of fine dust over a short wooden counter, behind which were bare shelves. The air was acrid with the smell of chloride of lime. Behind the counter was a door through which we passed into the much larger room at the back. The chloride smell was even stronger here. Grey light came through a side window, before which was a long black-stained workbench. The higher parts of the brick walls were blackened with smoke. There was a door in the back wall, presumably leading into a yard, and an empty fireplace. Opposite the window and workbench was a rickety stair, under which there was a small cupboard door.

The room was dominated by a great black iron printing press. It comprised an upright rectangular frame, attached to which was a giant vice holding a heavy square metal plate which hovered threateningly over a flat table below. It was all too easy to imagine Wedderburn lying across it. The floor around the press had evidently been scrubbed hard but it was still stained with black. The only other furniture was a deal table, a round-backed chair, a few metal plates and some wooden boxes.

Blake paced slowly about the room. He tried the back door, which was locked, and the small cupboard, which was not. He
walked around the press, never touching it, stepping back from time to time to look at it from another angle.

‘Should we not ask someone’s permission before we do this?’ I said.

He seemed to be in some kind of reverie and barely heard me.

‘Blake?’

‘Let’s see if the family’s upstairs,’ he said.

There was a door at the top of the stairs and I made to climb them.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll go up the outside steps. Don’t want to frighten them.’ Ostentatiously he ‘locked up’ the shop behind him, and we walked around the side where there were steps up to another door. At the top, Blake knocked. Silence, then a creak. He knocked again. Eventually a cry: ‘Ma!’ The sound of footsteps.