Doktor Glass (13 page)

Then he remembered an old trick. He slid out the two drawers above the locked one; they stuck a little, then came out completely from the bureau to give him access to the inside. Langton reached through the bureau carcass and drew out the contents of the bottom drawer.

A heavy cash box, locked. A diary. Three checkbooks. Putting the box to one side, Langton flicked through the diary. Against certain dates, initials, a number, and a sum in pounds—no shillings or pence.
April seventh, AC, 21, £10. August twelfth, DH, 3, £25. October eleventh, SP, 16, £30.
The last entry appeared on November the fifteenth. Ten days ago.

Blackmail? Payment for drugs? The clandestine notation implied as much. Perhaps.

Langton pocketed the diary and opened the checkbooks. Redfers had an account at St. Martin’s Bank on Victoria Street, and the stubs recorded small amounts to tailors and tradesmen, nothing remarkable. The regular transactions of a comfortably settled bachelor. The final stub left a balance of seven hundred pounds and some.

The other two checkbooks implied something quite different. The second book, for an account with the Banque Credite Zurich, showed a balance of more than six thousand pounds. The final checkbook had been issued by a New York institution and showed a balance of almost twenty thousand dollars. If the accounts really did hold as much as the books implied, Redfers had been close to rich. Certainly more comfortably off than a hardworking bachelor doctor might hope for. An honest one, anyway.

Of course, Redfers might have inherited money. He might have won it through gambling, or the stock market. Langton hoped so. He
didn’t welcome the alternative possibilities. This man had looked after Sarah in her final hours, for God’s sake.

The locked cabinets beside the bureau had steel mesh woven through their glass. On the shelves, row after row of bottles, phials, solutions, and powders. Langton recognized some of the drugs as those that had crowded Sarah’s bedside table before the end. Langton caught a reflection in the glass and saw the skeleton hanging in the corner. What an exhibit to have in a doctor’s office. Enough to frighten off your patients.

White, white bone. Glossy and smooth under the electric light. All that was left after the flesh broke down and melted away.

Langton couldn’t help it: He thought of Sarah, lying alone under the cold earth. Still. Silent. Nightmare images crowded his mind. He clutched the edge of Redfers’s desk like a drowning man clinging to driftwood. He swallowed, fighting the urge to vomit.

Another image. Pick something else to focus on. Anything.

The thick, braided cables of an electrical cord sprouted from the skirting by the fireplace. Heavy with dust, the cord led from a brass socket and into the cupboard beneath one of the bookcases beside the chimney breast.

The cupboard door opened to reveal a squat apparatus of brass, steel, and shellac or bois durci. A small box, a cylinder of wound copper wire, a slender vertical tube, all on a wooden base. The whole machine could fit into a Disraeli bag. But when Langton tried to lift it, he found it heavier than it appeared. It gave off the familiar electrical odor of burned dust, and another, sweeter floral smell, like patent ointments.

Langton knelt down. The box hummed as if taking current. Wires trailed from the cylinder and terminated in two small copper squares tinted with verdigris. Traces of skin and a few hairs still clung to the metal.

“McBride,” Langton called, already at the door. “To the basement.”

McBride looked up from Mrs. Dunne’s ledger. “Sir?”

Langton waited until they had dropped down the stairs at the rear of the entrance hall. “Agnes said Redfers’s midnight visitors went to the basement. We need to discover why.”

In the harsh electric light, the basement door looked stout enough to defend a bank vault. Thick strips of iron braced the heavy wood. Bolt heads as broad as farthings. And everything painted white, even the massive lock.

“I could ask the maid if she has a key,” McBride said.

Langton shook his head. He doubted Agnes went into this room or knew of a key. He left McBride and ran up to Redfers’s consulting room. In the top left-hand drawer of the desk, a selection of iron keys. Langton grabbed the largest and ran back to the basement. He slotted key after key in the lock, then threw them to the stone floor with a clang.

The penultimate key fitted, then turned. The great door swung back into darkness. The smell of damp and stale air seeped into the passage. Langton groped around the edge of the inner wall until his hand found a switch. Cold white light flooded the basement chamber.

Empty. Empty shelves against the white tile walls. Empty tables in the center. Langton and McBride paced the room, their footsteps echoing. Cages covered the two electric globes. The windows, like the fireplace, had been bricked up. The whole room had an air of enclosure, of constriction, as though the walls themselves pressed in. Unhealthy.

“Whatever was down here has flown, sir,” said McBride, slapping the steel table with his hand.

“But dust carries its own message, Sergeant. Look.” Langton pointed to the shelves standing against the walls. The falling dust had outlined large, circular rings in the white-painted wood. “Something stood here not so long ago.”

“Jars or canisters, I’d say, sir.”

Langton didn’t reply. He looked along the rows of shelves. Circular dust rings as far as he could see. And on the shelf in front of each
ring, a stenciled number. Langton remembered Redfers’s diary entries:
April seventh, AC, 21, £10. August twelfth, DH, 3, £25. October eleventh, SP, 16, £30.

“It doesn’t make any sense, sir,” McBride said.

But a whole section of the case had slotted into place in Langton’s mind. “I’m very much afraid that it does, Sergeant.”

A
S HE WALKED
along Church Street toward headquarters, Langton went over the evidence from Redfers’s house. The tide of jostling workers hurrying to offices and jobs carried him along. In the distance, factory whistles announced the start of shifts. The cold morning sunlight gilded the grimy city center buildings, but Langton saw again the dim consulting room and the basement with its empty shelves.

Langton’s rage had subsided to a dull, constant ache, like embers flickering and ready to erupt. He’d trusted Redfers, just as Sarah’s family had trusted the man, their doctor for almost three decades. Redfers had betrayed them all by involving himself in the illicit trade. There could be little doubt of his guilt: the strange electrical apparatus, the imprints of the ranks of jars hurriedly spirited away, the excessive sums of money, the midnight callers. Even worse, the evidence supported the existence of the Jar Boys. Langton knew now that he could fight it no longer—they existed.

For a moment, Langton had wondered if Redfers and Doktor Glass
were one and the same. That suspicion had passed. Instead, Langton saw the hands of Doktor Glass behind the murders, directing them, orchestrating them for his own ends. And not without help, since the shelves had spaces for one hundred forty-two jars and the transfer could have taken an hour or more. Langton had asked McBride to question the neighbors; someone must have seen Glass’s men taking the jars away.

As headquarters drew near, Langton wondered how he would break the news of Redfers’s duplicity to Sarah’s parents. He’d interrogated murderers and molesters, anarchists, thieves, and arsonists. Those interviews would be nothing compared to the pain of telling Mr. and Mrs. Cavell that Sarah might have suffered even more than they’d realized. Might still be suffering.

Langton stopped at the foot of the headquarters steps, closed his eyes a moment, and drew a breath. He would do what he had to do. He had no choice.

Inside the building, the desk sergeant called Langton across. “McBride told us to look out for this man of yours, sir. Durham.”

“You have him?”

“We have
sight
of him, sir. Maybe.”

“Where? And how recent?”

Like a clerk in an accountant’s office, the desk sergeant consulted the massive ledger. “Yesterday evening, sir. Around ten o’clock near the encampment. The constable chased after him but the fella disappeared into the crowd by the gatehouse.”

Ten the night before. Durham could be anywhere by now. If it had been Durham at all. Still, a cold trail was better than no trail at all. “Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll visit the encampment myself.”

“I wouldn’t go alone, sir.”

Langton turned back to the high desk. “Why not?”

“It’s an unruly place, that encampment. They don’t like police or anyone from the Span Company going in there. Especially the closer
they get to the bridge’s opening. You might want to take a guide in with you.”

“A guide?” Langton said, smiling. “This is Liverpool, not Africa.”

The sergeant blushed slightly. “Even so, sir, I’d advise it. I drink with a bloke from the Corporation who knows his way around the camp. They don’t mind him so much, sir, seeing as how the Corpy helps with food and shelter.”

Langton hesitated. “Can your friend take me over this morning?”

“I’ll send a lad to ask him, sir,” the desk sergeant said, already waving over one of the yawning office boys.

Upstairs, in his office, Langton wondered about the encampment. As far as he knew, it had started as a few tents and rough shelters to hold the families of laborers working on the Span, men who might be away for weeks at a time as the Span stretched across the Atlantic. The camp had grown as the Span grew. How had it become such a thorn in the Span Company’s side, and a place where policemen feared to patrol? Perhaps the man from the Corporation, Liverpool’s city council, would know.

Langton had almost finished adding Redfers’s details to the case file when he heard a hesitant knocking at the door. “Come in.”

A constable slid into the room, his helmet under his arm. He stood straight and looked past Langton, to the view of Victoria Street. “Inspector.”

Langton struggled to remember the man’s face. He’d seen so many people over the past few days. “You’re…”

“Constable Eames, sir. I was at Hamlet Street. The dead burglar.”

“I remember. How is Mrs. Grizedale?”

Eames blushed. “I have to tell you, sir…I mean, I have to say…”

“Go on, man.”

“Well, you asked me to look after the two women, sir, this Mrs. Grizedale and her maid.”

Langton’s heart jumped. “And?”

“I hailed a hansom, sir, and went along with the two women. The maid told the driver to take us to Toxteth, Upper Parliament Street. I was sitting beside her and noticed how she kept looking back through the window. Then, as we got to Canning Place, she dug her claws into my arm and swore someone was following us. I told the cab to stop, got out, and—”

“They drove on without you.”

Constable Eames looked at the floor. “They did, sir.”

Langton smiled with relief. He’d expected to hear much worse from the constable. “I don’t suppose you took a note of the cab’s number.”

“I’m sorry, sir. What with all the excitement, the dead man and everything…I remember what company it was, sir: Tate and Sampson.”

The largest cab company in the city. “Leave it with me, Eames.”

“I’m sorry for letting you down, sir.”

“You did right to tell me.”

Alone again, Langton leaned back and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t returned home until after four in the morning. Three hours’ fitful dozing had left him more exhausted than before. As he’d shaved, he’d seen Sarah’s medicines in the cabinet: morphine, opiates, tinctures, preparations. And a small brown glass bottle of white pills. Benzedrine, for Sarah’s failing energy.

Tempted to take one, Langton had even opened the bottle. He worried that once he started, he’d never stop. Coffee seemed a less harmful choice. He’d pocketed the pills just in case.

Now, after sending Harry for a flask of coffee, he added the constable’s comments to the file. He didn’t panic about Mrs. Grizedale and Meera; the maid had simply outfoxed Constable Eames since she obviously didn’t trust anybody at the moment. Perhaps that was wise.

Sipping coffee, Langton tried to remember what Meera had said the night before, something about going to her family. Where could she have taken Mrs. Grizedale? Hopefully somewhere beyond the reach of the man who’d sent the killer. Was that same man Doktor Glass?

Another knock at the door, this time a small, wiry man in a faded
brown suit and derby hat. “Inspector Langton? The name’s Dowden, sir, Herbert Dowden, from the Corporation. Ted said you needed someone to show you around the camp.”

Ted must be the desk sergeant. Langton shook the man’s hand. “Thank you for coming over, Mr. Dowden. I hope I haven’t interrupted your work.”

“Glad to get out of the office, sir, and into the fresh air. Shall we go over there now?”

Langton grabbed his Ulster coat and went to lock away the case file. Inside his coat pocket, the angular bulk of his force-issue Webley revolver, which he’d taken from his bedside cabinet. As he and Dowden took Victoria Street and then Dale Street toward the Pier Head, Langton said, “I’m surprised that I should need a guide, Mr. Dowden.”

“Oh, I think it’s wise, sir. They’ve taken against the police, just as they took against the Span Company.”

“Who exactly are ‘they’?”

Dowden waited until a tram had trundled past, hissing sparks. “There’s a fair mix of people now, sir. Started out with a few families, wives and children of the men building the bridge. Navvies, masons, metalworkers, drillers, carpenters; the Company needed them all, and more besides.”

As Dale Street became Water Street, the Span emerged from between the buildings like a mountain suddenly appearing between foothills. The rising sun coated the towers and steel cables with gold.

Dowden continued, “She’s a hungry beast, that Span. A lot of the men that worked on her never came back home. The families they left behind felt badly done to: no compensation from the Company, nothing from the government. So they stayed put. The camp grew and grew.”

Langton could see the encampment now as he and Dowden reached the foot of Water Street. Across four wide lanes of traffic, past the pillars and girders of the elevated electric railway—the so-called dockers’ umbrella—lay the camp’s fringes. Tents, many of them
ex-military sand-colored cotton, clustered around smoking fires. A rough barricade of recycled wood, metal, and masonry marked the boundary between the temporary shelters and the respectable world outside.