Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness (11 page)

‘I ain’t had a woman for weeks, boss,’ the drunk said, wheedlingly. ‘Not for weeks.’

‘Then go out and find yourself a cheap whore!’

‘I don’t like payin’ for it. Anyway, they ain’t the same as a sweet little thing like her.’

The boss lifted his hand and pointed his index finger directly at the drunk’s face. ‘You will leave her alone,’ he warned. ‘You will not damage her. Do you understand? You will not damage
any
of the goods.’

‘It ain’t as if anybody’s likely to notice—not where she’s goin’,’ the drunk argued.

The boss moved so quickly that it was almost a blur to Lizzie. One moment he was standing near the door, the next he’d crossed the room and was slapping the drunk in the face.

Once! Twice! Three times!

The drunken man finally seemed to understand the predicament he had got himself into, and sank to his knees.

‘I’m sorry, boss,’ he said, almost sobbing. ‘I didn’t mean it. I swear I didn’t mean it.’

The other man took three steps back, and raised his cane in the air as if he were about to strike the drunk.

‘No, boss, please!’ the drunk moaned.

The boss lowered the cane. ‘You disgust me! You truly disgust me. Get out of my sight—and don’t let me see you again for the rest of the day.’

The drunk scrambled to his feet and rushed out of the open door.

When he’d gone, the boss turned to Lizzie and said, in a kindly voice, ‘I’m very sorry about that, my dear. I promise you that nothing like it will ever happen again.’

‘Why are you keepin’ me locked up here?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Because I have plans for you, and you must stay here until those plans come to fruition.’

‘You what?’

‘There’s something I need you to do for me—but I don’t need you to do it for me yet.’

‘Couldn’t you—Couldn’t you just let me go?’ Lizzie pleaded.

‘I’m afraid not,’ the man told her. ‘I’ve already got too much invested in this operation to do that.’

‘What operation?’ Lizzie asked. ‘I don’t have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Be patient, and all will be revealed to you,’ the man said soothingly. ‘And in the meantime, my dear, try to learn to savour the things that you’re being offered here. The food, for example. If I remember correctly, there’s best beefsteak on the menu tonight.’

He smiled at her, then stepped out of the cell. Once he was outside, he slammed the door behind him and locked it.

*

Inspector Maddox was so smilingly friendly when he greeted Archie Patterson that, for a moment, the sergeant toyed with the idea that the real Maddox must have been disposed of overnight and this unconvincing replica left in his place.

‘I had my doubts about you initially, Sergeant, as I’d have had my doubts about any officer who’d been working for Inspector Blackstone for any length of time,’ Maddox told him. ‘But, from what I’ve read in your report, you seem to have pulled the whole thing off rather splendidly.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Patterson replied.

‘Yes, rather splendidly,’ Maddox repeated. ‘As soon as the madam has managed to get her hands on a suitable girl, she’ll ring you. And as soon as you’ve made the second payment, we can arrest her. I can see no difficulty at all in bringing this case to an entirely satisfactory conclusion.’

‘And do you think she’ll be convicted?’

‘I don’t see how she could fail to be, as long as you make sure that the money you hand over has been marked and recorded first.’

‘But will she go to gaol?’

‘Ah, that depends,’ Maddox said evasively.

‘On what?’

‘On any number of things.’

‘For example?’

‘For a start, on whether or not the newspapers still have an interest in the case by the time it comes to trial. If they have, then an example will certainly have to be made of her.’

‘And if they haven’t?’ Patterson asked.

‘Then there’s the question of her barrister,’ Maddox continued, ignoring the sergeant’s question. ‘If he’s good—if he knows how to spin his story well—the madam could end up looking only slightly less of a victim than the girl herself’

‘She can probably afford the best lawyer around,’ Patterson said miserably. ‘Are there any other factors which might affect the outcome?’

Maddox chuckled. The miserable bastard actually
chuckled
! ‘And then, of course, there’s the judge,’ he said.

‘You mean that some judges are more severe in their sentencing than others?’ Patterson asked.

‘I mean that if the judge she comes up before is one of her clients—or one of his close colleagues on the bench is one of her clients—he’ll probably be inclined to take a more lenient view than he might otherwise have done.’

‘And how likely is that?’ Patterson wondered.

Maddox chuckled again. ‘If you’d known some of the judges I’ve known, you’d think it
very
likely.’

‘So all the effort we’d put into this operation could turn out to be a complete waste of time?’ Patterson asked despondently.

‘Not at all,’ Maddox said, still buoyed up by his own good humour, and not even noticing that Patterson was not sharing the mood. ‘We will have done everything that the Home Secretary asked us to do, won’t we?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘And that will be duly noted, so that when it comes round to the time to be considered for promotion, we’ll both already be ahead of the field. I’d rather like to be a superintendent, you know.’

‘Would you, sir?’ Patterson asked flatly.

‘I would indeed. And given the cock-up that Superintendent Bullock seems to be making, there may very well soon be a vacancy.’

‘So, the madam could walk away scot-free, could she?’

‘Not scot-free, no. There’ll have to be a fine—probably rather a hefty one—which, in my opinion, is punishment enough, considering that all she was doing was striving to meet her clients’ needs.’

Two

Walsingholme Manor could not strictly have been called a stately home. It did not dominate the surrounding landscape like the ancestral piles of some of England’s oldest families did. It did not have an east wing and a west wing attached to the main building, each of them as long as—and far more impressive than—the average London working-class street. But, even allowing for that, it was still a very substantial edifice of perhaps forty or forty-five rooms, which had been built in a pleasant and reasonably unostentatious neo-classical style.

‘Sir John Walsingholme’s great-grandfather was a master potter,’ Bullock told Ellie, as the pony trotted up the long driveway to the front entrance of the house. ‘I’ve seen some of his work on display in the museum. Very impressive. He was a real craftsman!’

‘I’d be willing to wager he didn’t earn enough to buy this place, though,’ Ellie Carr said.

Bullock laughed. ‘You’re right. It was Sir John’s grandfather who had the head for business. He ended up
owning
the pottery factory in which his own dad had worked.’

‘And, from then on, the family’s never looked back?’

‘More or less. Sir John’s father sold the factory—lock, stock and barrel—for an absolute fortune, and then bought as much land as he could lay his hands on. I knew him—though not, of course, to speak to. He was the master of the local hunt and the sheriff of the county. You’d never have guessed, to look at him, that his granddad had made his money by getting his hands dirty.’

‘What’s Sir John himself like?’ Ellie asked.

‘Two days ago, I’d have said that he was a fine figure of a man—a real man’s man. He nearly won the Wimbledon Tennis Championship a few years ago, you know.
Would
have won it, if he hadn’t come up against William Renshaw, who was at the top of his game at that time. But like I said, that was two days ago.’

‘And what’s he like now?’

‘Now,’ Bullock said sombrely, ‘the man’s a wreck.’

*

The pub was called the Hanging Tree. And, for all Blackstone knew, there might well once have been a tree on the site from which rebellious peasants and other malcontents had been hanged by the neck until dead.

But if that
were
so, there was certainly no trace of the grisly history to be seen now. Instead there was just a perfectly ordinary working boozer, which stood in the shadow of the town’s covered market hall.

When he opened the door of the public bar, he saw that the place was already packed out with customers.

He navigated his way around the various groups of drinkers, and when he reached the bar he ordered himself a pint of bitter.

It was while he was reaching into his pocket for his cigarettes that the accident happened. His elbow knocked into one of the pint pots sitting on the bar and sent it flying. The pot hit the floor on the bar side of the counter, spilling what little beer was left in it, and bouncing once before coming to rest.

‘That’s was my bloody drink you just spilt,’ said an angry voice to Blackstone’s right.

The inspector turned. The speaker was a huge, barrel-chested man with a three-day growth of beard on his face that did not quite hide the scar running down his cheek.

‘Sorry about that, mate,’ Blackstone said easily. ‘Let me buy you another one.’

‘Are you a foreigner?’ the other man demanded.

Blackstone shook his head. ‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘But even if I was, I’d still be more than willing to buy you that drink.’

‘You sound a lot like a bloody dirty foreign swine to me,’ the other man growled.

‘Now, now, Mick, we don’t want any trouble in here,’ said the landlord soothingly, from the other side of the bar. ‘Accidents will happen, and you’d all but finished that pint anyway, hadn’t you?’

The man he’d called ‘Mick’ whirled round towards him.

‘You keep out of this,’ he warned. ‘I want to know if this bastard who’s spilled my beer is a foreigner.’

Blackstone sighed. He’d dealt with enough aggressive drunks in his time on the Force to know that this man was looking for trouble, and whatever he himself said would make no difference. Still, he supposed he might as well try to smooth things over.

‘I’m from London,’ he told Mick.

‘From London!’ the drunk repeated. ‘From bloody
London!
Then you’ve no business bein’ here, have you?’

He was speaking so loudly—and so unpleasantly—that people were already starting to edge away.

And it was just as well that they were, Blackstone told himself. Because this Mick character was big and heavy, and even in a half-drunk state, he would still take a lot of handling.

‘I said, you’ve no business bein’ up here in Cheshire, have you?’ Mick repeated.

‘Why don’t you let me buy you that drink, to show how sorry I am about spilling yours?’ Blackstone suggested. ‘And let me get you a whisky chaser, while I’m about it.’

‘I want you to show me just how sorry you
really
are,’ Mick said. ‘I want you to get down on your knees—an’ lick my boots.’

Blackstone shook his head, almost regretfully. ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ he said.

‘Can’t you, by God!’ Mick roared. ‘Well, we’ll soon see about that, won’t we, now?’

He feinted with his left arm, and led with his right fist. The deception might have worked on a man with little experience of street fighting, but it didn’t work on Blackstone. He blocked his opponent’s attack with his right arm and punched with his left. His fist connected with a jawbone that felt as hard as iron. Mick’s head rocked, and then he toppled over backwards, hitting the floor with a heavy thud.

For a second he looked completely dazed, then a smile came to his face.

‘You’re tougher than you look, you long streak of piss an’ wind,’ he said to Blackstone.

‘A lot of people have told me that,’ Blackstone replied. ‘Can I buy you that drink now?’

There was some spittle and blood around Mick’s mouth, and he wiped it away with the sleeve of his jacket.

‘Why not?’ he asked. He held his arm in the air. ‘You help me back up on to my feet, you can buy me that drink—or maybe I’ll buy you one instead—an’ we’ll pretend that none of this has ever happened.’

‘I shouldn’t think you need any help from me to get up,’ Blackstone said flatly.

‘You’re probably right,’ Mick agreed.

He put his hands on the floor and raised his torso off the ground. He winced, said ‘Ouch’, then smiled again. And still Blackstone did not move.

The big man made quite a show of the difficulties of standing up, but once he was on his feet, he came back to life immediately.

With his right hand, he grabbed a pint glass, smashed it against the counter, then jabbed the jagged edge of the glass in Blackstone’s direction.

‘Now we’ll have some fun,’ he snarled. ‘Now we’ll see how you Londoners bleed.’

‘You really don’t want to do this,’ Blackstone warned him.

‘Don’t I?’ Mick asked. ‘An’ will you still be tellin’ me that when you’re screamin’ like a stuck pig?’

He lunged forward, the jagged edge aimed at his enemy’s throat. Blackstone sidestepped, and as Mick blundered past him he struck out with his boot and caught the big man a heavy blow squarely on the kneecap.

Mick came to a halt, let the broken glass in his hand fall to the floor, and sent an urgent message from his brain to his body that it should forget the pain in his knee and concentrate on maintaining his balance.

It was at that moment—just as the message was getting through—that Blackstone kicked the kneecap a second time, so hard that the sound of the crack echoed off the walls.

‘You bastard!’ Mick screamed, as his leg gave way underneath him and he fell to the floor for the second time.

Two uniformed police constables appeared in the doorway and elbowed their way through the crowd.

‘It was the man on the floor—Mick Huggins—who started it all,’ the landlord told them. ‘This gentleman was doin’ no more than defending himself.’

The constables bent down, took one of Mick’s arms each and pulled him up off the floor.

‘We’re arresting you for causing a public affray,’ one of them told the big man, who was, of necessity, putting all his weight on one leg and looked as if he might collapse again.

‘We may be needin’ you as a witness, sir,’ the constable said to Blackstone.

The inspector nodded. ‘My name’s Blackstone. Your Inspector Drayman knows where I can be contacted.’

The constables frogmarched Mick out of the door.

When they’d gone, Blackstone turned back to the bar. ‘Nice quiet little town you’ve got here, isn’t it?’ he said conversationally to the landlord.

*

Superintendent Bullock had been no more than accurate when he’d described Sir John Walsingholme as a wreck, Ellie Carr thought, looking down at the man slumped in the armchair.

Walsingholme’s eyes were bloodshot, his skin was grey and there was a tremble in his hands over which he clearly had no control. If she hadn’t previously been told he was in his mid-forties, Ellie could easily have taken him for at least seventy.

‘We’re very sorry to bother you at a distressing time like this, sir,’ Superintendent Bullock told the shadow in the armchair.

Walsingholme raised his head slightly, though it seemed to cost him a great deal of effort.

‘You have your job to do, Superintendent. I quite understand that,’ he said in a voice that fell somewhere between a whisper and a croak.

‘We’re concentrating most of our efforts on looking for any suspicious strangers who might have been spotted in the area just before your daughter disappeared,’ Bullock said. ‘We’ve had no reports of any so far, but we mustn’t give up hope yet.’

‘Hope!’ Walsingholme repeated hollowly. ‘There is
no
hope now that my darling Emma’s dead.’

‘If we catch her killer...’

‘Even if you did catch him—even were you to subject him to such pain as no man has experienced before—it still wouldn’t bring her back.’

‘That’s true,’ Ellie Can said, sympathetically. ‘But at least it would ensure that other girls didn’t suffer the same fate.’

Though she had been standing right in front of him, Walsingholme only now seemed to notice she was even there.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘This is Dr Carr,’ Bullock said.

Walsingholme laughed bitterly. ‘You’re too late,’ he said. ‘My daughter is beyond your help now.’

‘Dr Carr is a forensic pathologist,’ Bullock said. ‘She’d like to examine your daughter’s body.’

‘Why?’ Walsingholme asked.

‘It might help us to learn more about the nature of her death,’ Ellie explained.

‘But we know what killed her. She was strangled, and then she was...and then she was...’

‘Her body may hold more clues to her murder than are obvious to the naked eye,’ Ellie said evenly.

‘I don’t understand,’ Walsingholme confessed wearily.

‘A more detailed examination of her remains might well reveal...’

A look of pure horror came to Sir John’s face, as he finally understood what Ellie was saying.

‘You want to cut her up!’ he exploded.

‘That might well be a part of the process,’ Ellie admitted. ‘But I can assure you that if any incisions are necessary, her remains will be granted all the respect and dignity that—’

‘The poor child has lost her hands and her feet!’ bellowed Walsingholme, finding new strength from the rage that was engulfing him. ‘Her face—and most of her body—has been slashed to ribbons! And you want to mutilate her further? What kind of monster are you?’

‘Whatever I may do to her, can’t hurt her now,’ Ellie said gently. ‘And it might just help to bring her killer to justice.’

‘I’ve already told you, that won’t bring her back!’

‘And by arresting the man before he can do any more harm, we’ll be sparing other parents the suffering that you’ve had to endure.’

‘Let them suffer!’ Walsingholme said. ‘Let the whole world suffer, if sparing it suffering means defiling my dear sweet daughter even further.’

‘We should be leaving,’ Bullock told Ellie, with a sudden urgency in his voice.

But Ellie stood her ground. ‘We’ve come to ask your permission as a matter of courtesy, Sir John...’ she began.

‘Courtesy!’

‘…but the truth of the matter is that I’m afraid you have no choice but to accept that the autopsy will go ahead. In the case of violent death, the law is quite clear about our right to do whatever—’

‘To hell with the law!’ Walsingholme said. ‘It has been arranged that my poor daughter will be buried tomorrow, and that arrangement stands. And between now and then, no one—not even the Lord Chancellor himself—will go near her. I will give up my life before I will allow any of you to touch her.’

‘Sir John...’ Ellie said.

But she was already moving away from him—not because she wanted to, but because Superintendent Bullock was half-pushing, half-carrying her towards the door.