Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness (31 page)

Part One: Aldermans Stairs

One

The small crowd had formed almost as soon as the police rowing boat landed. At first it had been all of a huddle, and there was a real danger of the two Wet Bobs being forced down Battle Bridge Stairs and into the river. Then the senior of the two Thames policemen had ordered the mob to step back, and—reluctantly—it had. Now it formed a broad semicircle, so that those people who were at either end were perched perilously on the edge of the wharf, while those in the centre had their backs pressed up against the wall of the nearest warehouse.

From their various vantage points, the individuals who made up the crowd—costermongers who kept one of their eyes on the scene and the other on their barrows, trading company clerks with manifests tucked under their arms, watermen who spent most of the day rowing customers across the river, and the ne’er-do-wells who habitually hung around hoping to earn a dishonest shilling—all strained their necks to get the best view of what was happening.

There wasn’t a great deal to see. The two policemen stood almost like statues, and the sausage-shaped object they’d pulled out of the river was completely shrouded in a tarpaulin.

The sergeant swept his eyes over the restive mob, then leaned towards his partner. ‘I’ll be glad when somebody from Scotland Yard finally gets ’ere,’ he whispered.

‘Yer can say that again,’ the constable agreed.

And almost as if he had been waiting in the wings for his cue, a ‘somebody’ from Scotland Yard
did
appear. The new arrival was at least a head taller than anyone else on the wharf. He looked around him, assessed the situation, and then—seemingly effortlessly—induced the tightly packed mob to crush together even tighter in order to create a path for him.

A bit like Moses partin’ the Red Sea, thought the sergeant, who had had the Bible—and very little else—thoroughly knocked into him when he was a pupil at the Lant Street board school.

The tall man reached the front of the crowd, and came to a halt in the open space between it and the tarpaulin sausage. It was not just his height that made him stand out, the sergeant realized, although someone nearly six feet tall was a bit of a novelty. The man’s face, too, was striking. The sergeant ran his eyes over it quickly, taking in the details just as he’d been trained to. Bushy eyebrows formed two arches over sharp, penetrating eyes. The nose below them was large and almost a hook. The mouth was wide; the chin solid and square. The impression of Moses had been spot-on—though if the man really had been Jewish it would have been most unlikely he’d have been working for the Met.

The Scotland Yard man looked at the two river policemen in turn. ‘Inspector Blackstone,’ he said crisply.

The sergeant saluted. ‘I’m Sergeant Roberts, sir. An’ this ’ere is Constable Watts.’

The Inspector nodded, as if he had already known that, and was only testing their truthfulness. ‘Are you the ones that found him?’ he asked the sergeant.

‘That’s right, sir,’ Roberts agreed.

‘When and where?’

‘We were on the six o’clock shift,’ Roberts explained. ‘We start out from Wappin’ an’ go up river—’

‘Get to the point,’ Blackstone said—though not unkindly.

‘As we was drawin’ level wiv Battle Bridge Stairs, we saw this thing caught up in the ropes of a barge that was moored in the middle of the river. We didn’t know what it was at first, but as we got closer, we could see it was a body.’ Roberts shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘An’ that’s about it, sir. We pulled ’im on board, rowed to the shore, and ‘ere we are.’

‘Let’s have a look at him then,’ Blackstone said.

The sergeant glanced first at the crowd, and then back at the Inspector. ‘What about all these people, sir?’ he asked.

‘It’s a shame to disappoint them after they’ve waited so long,’ the Inspector told him.

If you’re sure, sir...’ the sergeant said tentatively. Blackstone raised his head and looked into the crowd in such a way that almost every member of it blinked.

‘We’re taking the tarpaulin off now,’ he said in a large, authoritative voice he had not used previously, ‘and if any of you moves so much as an inch forward, I swear I’ll have you. Understand?’

Several heads nodded to indicate belief and acceptance. Satisfied, Blackstone turned back to the sergeant. ‘Let the dog see the rabbit, then.’

The two river policemen knelt down and rolled the corpse out of the tarpaulin. Then, when they’d straightened up again, the Inspector bent down in their place.

Blackstone frowned. ‘This isn’t good,’ he said. ‘This is trouble.’

‘What is, sir?’

‘We’re not looking at one of your average dockland murders here. This man isn’t even a local.’

Roberts ran his eyes over the corpse’s clothes—jacket fraying at the cuffs, trousers that had seen better days, boots scuffed at the toecaps. ‘He’s dressed like a local, sir.’

‘Agreed. But look at his face.’

The sergeant examined the dead man’s features. ‘I see what you mean, sir,’ he admitted.

The murder victim was probably twenty-three or twenty-four, Blackstone estimated, but his was not the early-twenties face usually seen in the area—a face that was already showing signs of starting to lose the struggle for existence, and proclaimed, more eloquently than words ever could, that the owner of the face was no more than twelve or fourteen years from the grave.

No, there was none of pinchedness of growing up in poverty on this face. None of the lines earned by working long hours from the age of twelve or thirteen. What he had here, the Inspector decided reluctantly, was the corpse of one of the Quality.

He let his eyes travel down to the throat, and examined the deep jagged gash that ran the whole length of the jawbone. ‘Nasty,’ he said, more to himself than to anyone else.

And the killer hadn’t been satisfied to merely half-sever the head. The chest was pitted with at least a couple of dozen stab wounds as if the assassin couldn’t quite accept he’d already accomplished what he’d set out to do.

‘So what d’yer make of it, sir?’ asked Sergeant Roberts.

‘Well, it’s either murder or the most determined case of suicide I’ve ever seen,’ Blackstone told him.

Roberts raised an eyebrow. ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

Blackstone sighed. ‘If you want to get on in the police force, Sergeant, then the first thing you have to learn is to laugh at your superiors’ jokes—however bad they happen to be.’

The sergeant grinned. ‘Right, sir, I’ll remember that.’

The Inspector lifted one of the dead man’s limp hands, and examined it critically. ‘Any thoughts on this, Sergeant?’

Roberts peered down at the hand. ‘Broken finger nails,’ he said after a few seconds’ scrutiny. ‘But ’e doesn’t look to me like the kind of bloke ’oo’d ’ave broken ’em at work.’

‘Agreed.’

‘An’ there seems to be a strand of somefink caught under one of ‘em.’

‘Rope fibre,’ Blackstone said firmly. ‘And where was a young gent like him likely to have come into contact with rope?’

‘Dunno, sir,’ the sergeant confessed.

‘By the river. The broken nails indicate haste, the rope points to a boat. I would suggest he was trying to free a boat from its moorings when he was murdered.’

‘You might be right, sir,’ Roberts admitted.

‘How long do you think he’s been in the water?’

The sergeant turned his gaze to the face again. ‘Not much sign of ’im swellin’ up yet. I’d say it couldn’t be more than a few hours.’

Blackstone nodded his agreement. ‘In other words, he was murdered sometime in the early hours, right by the riverside. Have you got a tide timetable on you?’

‘Don’t need one, sir,’ the sergeant said confidently. ‘Down at Wappin’, we know the tides better’n we know our own names. It started to ebb at twelve minutes past three precisely.’

‘So assuming we’re right about when the body entered the water, it would have been carried up river for a short time. Then, if it hadn’t been caught up in the mooring ropes, it would have been swept out to sea.’

‘That’s about the size of it, sir.’

Blackstone let the corpse’s hand drop back to his side, and was just on the point of standing up when he noticed the dead man’s left eye.

‘What do you make of that, Roberts?’ he said, pointing. ‘It’s bruised.’

‘You’re right. But I don’t think that happened when he was getting his throat cut. Do you?’

Roberts shook his head. ‘From the way it’s healed, I’d say he got that particular injury at least a couple of days ago.’

The black eye might—or might not—be connected to the murder, Blackstone thought. Only time would tell.

He stood up. ‘When you get back to Wapping, have a word with your comrades who were on night duty, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Find out if they saw anything suspicious.’

‘I’ll do that, sir,’ Roberts promised.

Blackstone nodded. He was sure that the sergeant—who seemed a conscientious officer—would make every effort to follow his instructions. But though he had made the request himself, the Inspector doubted that Roberts’ inquiries would turn up anything remotely useful—because he already had the feeling that this was a crime in which
nothing
would come easy.

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