Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness (20 page)

Friday: The horror! The horror!

One

Thick black smoke poured out of a hundred or more tall brick chimneys. The winding gear at a dozen rock-salt mines creaked and protested as it lowered men down to the drift or brought the results of their labours up to the surface. On the canal, the narrow-boats, pulled by stolid horses and loaded down with salt, were just setting out for their next destinations. In the railway marshalling yard, salt trucks were being coupled to engines bound for Liverpool and Manchester, London and Glasgow. It was eight o’clock in the morning, and another working day was already well under way.

Blackstone was crouched down in the confined space between two large industrial ash cans and the wall of the Jubilee Salt Works’ boiler room. He had taken up this position over an hour earlier.

This was not the ideal hiding place, he thought. In fact, if he was honest with himself, he’d have to admit that it was a bloody
awful
hiding place—a hiding place in which anyone really looking would have spotted him straight away.

But nobody
was
looking. And why would they be? Why would it even
occur
to a passer-by that any man would endure such obvious discomfort, merely for the opportunity of getting a clear view of the Number One Pan?

There was a part of him that kept repeating that this was all a complete waste of time. But there was another part, a stronger one, that was continually reminding him that though this surveillance operation—like many others he had taken part in—would probably get him nowhere, there was always just a chance that it might!

*

Entering the Stafford Police Morgue felt not unlike walking into enemy territory, and Ellie Carr and Jed Trent were treated with icy disdain by everyone from the uniformed officer who admitted them through the front door to the clerk who showed them up to Dr Waddle’s office.

The doctor himself was even less welcoming. ‘I’m allowing this in order to oblige the Chief Constable, who happens to be a good friend of mine,’ he told Ellie, ‘but that doesn’t mean I think it’s right.’

‘If you’d like to be present during the autopsy—’ Ellie suggested.

‘If that’s what I wanted, then I
would
be—with or without your permission,’ Waddle interrupted her. ‘But I believe in solid, well-tested procedures, and I’ve no wish to be associated—in any way—with the latest fashionable ideas that you people from London have come up with. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll introduce you to the corpse, then get off to my game of golf.’

He led them down to the morgue. When they reached the doorway, Ellie stopped and looked around her.

If Noah’s Ark had had its own morgue, it would have looked just like this one, she thought.

The dead girl was lying on a marble slab, covered by a white sheet.

‘I’ve had her stripped and washed,’ Waddle said.

‘You’ve had her
what?
’ Ellie demanded, outraged.

‘I didn’t want a young lady like you to have to handle a dirty corpse, so I had her cleaned up. But it wasn’t easy, as you’ll understand when you see the cadaver yourself, so I hope you appreciate the effort we’ve made.’

Before Ellie had the chance to question both Waddle’s intelligence and his parentage, Jed Trent stepped between the two doctors. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’d get to that golf course of yours as soon as you can, if I was you. Looks like it might rain later.’

Waddle nodded, turned on his heel, and left the morgue.

Ellie Carr, frozen to the spot, was clenching and unclenching her hands angrily. ‘He’s had her
washed!
’ she said. ‘The stupid bastard’s gone and had her washed!’

‘He might not have done too much harm,’ Trent said soothingly.

‘On the other hand—and this is much more likely—he could well have destroyed vital evidence!’ Ellie countered.

‘Let’s have a look at the body,’ Trent suggested, taking the corners of the sheet between his thumbs and forefingers and stripping it away.

The girl’s body was in an even more horrific state than they’d anticipated. The deep cuts covered her entire frame, and none was more than two inches from the next. Several of Lucy’s ribs were exposed, and her intestines were spilling out of her stomach like a long, malignant worm.

‘Why did he do it to her, for God’s sake?’ Jed Trent wondered. ‘If he wanted to hurt her parents, surely slashing her face and cutting off her hands and feet would have been enough?’

‘And if he’d done it for his sadistic pleasure, the cuts would have been much more frenzied and haphazard in their nature,’ Ellie said, taking a surgical gown from the nearest peg and slipping it on. ‘But this is all so...so
controlled.
’

‘What you said last night is starting to make a lot of sense,’ Trent told her. ‘He didn’t do this to send us a message; he did it to
hide
something from us. But I’m buggered if I know what it is.’

‘I’m buggered if I know either,’ Ellie agreed. She reached across to the instrument tray for a scalpel. ‘Let’s just hope the corpse can tell its own story.’

*

Lawrence Bickersdale strode into the yard of the Jubilee Salt Works with more of the air of a man who owned the place outright than the demeanour of a mere shareholder. He stopped in front of the Number One Pan to light a cheroot, then pushed the double doors open and disappeared into the steam.

Blackstone, now in his second hour of crouching behind the ash cans, found it hard to believe his luck. He’d been hoping he would see something suspicious—a package being passed, money changing hands—but he’d never imagined that Bickersdale would be so reckless as to expose himself at the centre of his operation.

It was ten minutes before the mine-owner emerged from the pan again, and when he did, he looked inordinately pleased with himself. Standing in front of the pan, he lit a second cheroot from the stub of his first, and set off in the direction of the salt works’ office.

Blackstone shifted position a little, in an effort to ease the cramp in his leg. There could have been only one reason for Bickersdale’s visit to the pan: the man had some more jewels he wanted to move, and was going ahead with it, despite the presence of a Scotland Yard detective in the village!

His arrogance was almost incredible, Blackstone thought.

He seemed to think he could be as blatant in his illicit dealings in England as he had probably been in the Congo Free State. Well, he’d soon learn he was wrong about that.

*

Jamie Green was awoken by a gentle prodding in his side, and when he opened his eyes, he saw that a uniformed policeman was standing over him.

So the rats had not eaten him after all, he thought. Instead, they had decided to condemn him to another day of living hell.

‘What’s your name, son?’ the policeman asked.

‘James Green.’

‘We’ve been looking for a
Jamie
Green all night.’

‘And now you’ve found him.’

‘But are you the
right
Jamie Green? The one who we’ve been looking for had ideas above his station—thought he could mix with the local gentry as if he was one of them himself. Is that you?’

‘I never wanted to mix with the gentry,’ Jamie said tiredly. ‘I just wanted to be with my Lucy.’

‘Lucy? Is that the dead girl?’

‘Yes, it’s the dead girl. The beautiful, wonderful, dead girl.’

The constable nodded. ‘I’m going to ask you to stand up now, Jamie,’ he said. ‘I want you to do it very slowly.’

‘All right.’

‘And once you
are
standing, I’d like you to put your hands behind your back so I can handcuff you. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘I understand.’

‘Good. Start now. And remember what I said about doing everything slowly. I don’t want any trouble.’

‘And you won’t get any,’ Jamie promised him. ‘Not from me.’

*

Joshua Watkins, the manager of the Jubilee Salt Works, normally expected even shareholders in the company to knock before they entered his office, but having taken one look at the furious expression that filled Lawrence Bickersdale’s face, he decided that now was not the time to object to the fact that this particular shareholder had simply burst in.

‘Is something the matter, Mr Bickersdale?’ he asked.

‘You could say that,’ Bickersdale replied. ‘I’ve just paid a visit to Number One Pan.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because I own a part of this company, and I can go and inspect my investment any time I damn well please!’

‘You misunderstand me,’ Watkins said hurriedly. ‘What I meant to ask was, did you find something going on there that wasn’t to your liking?’

‘I found that you’ve so little understanding of how to run a salt works that they’ve employed a bunch of thieves, if that’s what you mean,’ Bickersdale snapped back.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘And well you might. When I entered the pan, I was wearing the diamond tie-pin that my dear grandfather left me in his will, and when I left the pan I didn’t have it any longer.’

‘Are you sure that you actually put it on this morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that one of the men took it?’

‘There was simply no other way it could have gone missing.’

‘Well, this is distressing,’ Watkins admitted. ‘And you may rest assured that I’ll question all the men as soon as they’ve finished their work.’

‘You’ll question all the men
now!
’ Bickersdale said.

‘You want me to go down to the pan myself, and—’

‘I want you to summon them to this office immediately, so that we can
both
question them.’

Watkins glanced up at the clock on the wall. ‘But the salt must almost be coming to the boil by now.’

‘It is.’

‘And if I take the men away from the pan, then the batch could well be ruined.’

‘It probably will be,’ Bickersdale agreed. ‘But I don’t care. I value that tie-pin more than I value anything else in the world, and I want it back now. So either you summon the men immediately, or I will call the police. And if there’s one thing you can be certain of, it is that a full-scale police search will damage production a great deal more than leaving a pan unattended for a few minutes.’

The manager sighed. ‘I’ll have the men sent for right away,’ he said defeatedly.

A ghost of a smile flickered on Bickersdale’s lips for a moment, and then was gone.

What a fool Blackstone was, he thought. Did the inspector really think that after the conversation they’d had the previous day he would be allowed to roam around Marston as he pleased? Could he possibly believe that the man he was spying on—the man he was determined to destroy—would have missed spotting him crouched behind the ash cans? And didn’t it occur to him—even for a second—that he might soon be walking into a trap?

The man was an amateur. A bungler. He wouldn’t have survived for an hour in the Congo Free State. And, as a matter of fact, he wasn’t due to survive for another hour in Marston, either.

*

Superintendent Bullock was not at all surprised when Jamie Green turned out to be a strikingly handsome boy, because Mrs Stanford had already told him that was the case. What
did
surprise him was just how young Jamie looked, for though he said that he was seventeen, he could easily have been taken for at least two years younger.

‘Why did you run away, Jamie?’ the superintendent asked.

‘I got scared,’ the boy replied. ‘I thought you’d be certain to blame Lucy’s death on me. But running away was the act of a coward! And a fool!’

‘Or a guilty man,’ Bullock pointed out.

‘If I’d only stopped to think for a minute, I’d have seen that it doesn’t matter what you believe,’ Jamie continued, and it was clear that he either hadn’t heard what Bullock said or didn’t care. ‘It doesn’t matter if I’m tried for murder and hanged—because now that Lucy’s dead, I don’t want to go on living anyway.’

There was an intensity and tragedy to his voice, and though Bullock wasn’t sure that he
wanted
to believe him, he discovered that he already
did
.

‘You must have really loved the girl,’ the superintendent heard himself say.

A tear trickled down Jamie’s cheek. ‘I did love her,’ he said. ‘And she loved me.’

‘But you must surely have known that you couldn’t possibly have had a future together. You’re just a groom. You could never have kept Lucy in the style to which she was accustomed.’

‘She didn’t care about living in style. All she wanted was to be with me for ever.’

‘But didn’t you realize that her parents would never accept it, however much their daughter wanted them to?’

‘I did. I wanted us to run away together straight away. But Lucy thought she could talk them round. If she’d...If she’d listened to me, she wouldn’t be dead now.
Why
didn’t I try harder to persuade her?’