SV - 03 - Sergeant Verity Presents His Compliments (17 page)

Jervis looked up, the triangle of fair beard seeming sharper, the grey eyes bright with fury.

'How dare youl' he shouted in a voice that half rose to a scream, 'how dare you impugn Jack Ransome! That man has been my legs, my eyes and ears. That man has brought me to life again!'

'Very sorry, sir,' Verity mumbled, and he began to feel that he really had behaved badly towards Ransome and Richard Jervis, that he deserved at least some of the wrath.

It was at this point that Ransome returned. He handed several slips of paper to Richard Jervis and Verity recognized them as the tracings of Elaine's blackmail note which he had made so that Samson might identify the writing. There was also a copy in his own hand of the entire note.

'Found in the fellow's room, sir,' said Ransome. 'His practice attempts for the final draft.'

"ere!
' said Verity in a purple fury, 'by what right is my belongings searched?'

'Unfortunate for you, Sergeant Verity,' said Jervis bitterly.

'Sir,' said Verity, hanging on to the truth like a terrier to the neck of a rat, 'I got proof that I never fabricated such a note. The girl Elaine admitted writing it, yesterday.' And he told the full story of the day's events.

Richard Jervis sniffed derisively.

'So,' he said, 'you seize your Elaine, a fifteen-year-old slut. You take her to a private place where she first refuses to have any part in your plan. Then your female accomplice strips her. She thrashes Elaine's backside for half an hour. And then, of course, the girl agrees to say that she wrote the letter. Might that not be it, sergeant?'

Verity was about to invoke Samson as a witness. Then he thought that if things went badly it would be better to save Samson rather than that they should both be destroyed. He said,

'Them photographic plates, sir. There's proof of blackmail in them.'

Lord Henry's double drawing-room was on the floor above them. In slow and painful procession they moved to the stairs, Richard Jervis shuffling with the aid of two sticks and Captain Ransome's powerful arms. At the staircase, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, Ransome picked up his master, like a groom carrying a bride, and bore him rapidly up the three sides of the staircase which rose above the central vestibule. At the double door of the drawing-room, Ransome took a key and opened the lock.

'Show us your evidence,’
said Richard Jervis. He was breathless and his wan face was pinched with pain.

Verity led the way into the front drawing-room and through the archway to the rear.

'The plates is in the secret compartment of the ornamental bureau, sir, what stands before the rear window at the centre,' he said triumphantly. Then he stopped. Before the rear window in question there was a small occasional table without a single drawer. Verity swung round to "see where the bureau had been moved to but there was no sign of it in the rear room. He charged like a wounded bull into the front drawing-room. It was not there either.

'Well?' snapped Richard Jervis.

'It's gone, sir. The bureau's gone. Someone must a-took
it!'

'Sergeant Verity,' said Jervis, 'if you are indeed a blackmailer, thank God you are also a stupid one.' Captain Ransome intervened.

'Sir, might not a murderer have left such evidence here for Mr Verity to find, hoping to suggest suicide by Lord Henry? Then, thinking that Mr Verity would never mention such disagreeable evidence to you, might not the murderer think himself safe to remove it after a few days during which nothing had happened?'

'It ain't likely, by God,' said Jervis
furiously, 'not without my key!
'

'Not just your key, sir,' said Ransome respectfully. 'There's Mrs Butcher's and Lord William's.'

Richard Jervis thought about this, and Verity looked sidelong at the bluff red face of Jack Ransome, a broken-down half-pay captain who had done him an unexpected friendly service by his suggestion.

'It could a-happened, sir,' said Verity encouragingly. 'That or something like it.'

Richard Jervis looked helplessly about the room. Then his gaze swung at Verity.

'Sergeant,' he said sharply, 'I advise you to forget what might have happened and remember instead what will happen. I have hired you and I will not release you so easily. If, in the shortest possible time, you do not provide the service for which I have paid, Inspector Croaker and your superiors shall hear the whole sorry story of your failure. More than that, I shall preserve the so-called blackmail letter and your own scribblings. They too shall go to Mr Croaker, with my compliments and my observations. Do not think, sergeant, that you will get the better of me by perjured evidence forced from a Lambeth stre
et-girl by beatings and threats!
'

'I been put up, sir!' said Verity, his voice quivering with anger.

'If you have sold yourself to my enemies, you shall find you h
ave made a bargain to repent of!’

'Sold!
' muttered Verity, jowls trembling, 'I been put up, sir, and the villain that done it ai
n't half got a reckoning to pay!
'

7

'Fifteen four and
a flush of five,’
said Mrs Rouncewell triumphantly.

'I'm low and Ped's high,' added Samson, turning over the dummy hand.

Mrs Rouncewell's healthy masculine features creased in a deep grin.

'Tip and me's game,' she announced. Then she collected the cards which lay on the table and coaxed them into a pack. The single illumination in her dark parlour was the oil lamp at the table's centre, casting a rich shadowy light on the faces of Samson and Verity who sat at play with her. Mrs Rouncewell splashed a careful measure of spirit from a stone jug into the three glasses, adding hot water from a kettle. Finally she plopped a lump of sugar into each.

'Nasty ungrateful wretch,' she said suddenly, recalling an earlier topic of discussion. 'Nasty charity-school creetur. Ran off the first chance she got, not minding the pains I'd took to apprentice her proper. There ain't no reason a girl can't make a respectable living at the wash-house, once she puts her mind to it. It ain't one of your dirty, unhealthy jobs. Clean 'olesome suds and water. Fresh linen. And I never had to give Miss Elaine her licks more 'n two or three times.'

'No appreciation,' said Samson sympathetically. 'But her mother was a whore and if the girl ever has a daughter she'll likely go the same way.'

'I could a-took a fancy to that little madam,' said Mrs Rouncewell wistfully.

Verity took a pull at the unaccustomed heat of the gin shrub and his eyes watered with the effect.

'You never saw who 'elped her out?' he asked breathlessly.

Mrs Rouncewell shook her head.

'Never
saw,'
she said carefully, 'but I know sure enough. Jack Tiptoe and the scaldrum dodge needed 'er. There was two of 'em as they calls Stunning Joe, the fighter, and American Jack, walking the pavement outside 'ere as if they'd been paid to walk a beat.'

'She ain't with 'em,' said Samson, 'not that we can see.'

'No,' said Mrs Rouncewell, 'she wouldn't be where you could
see,
a-cos she knows the consequence. Straight back 'ere for the bloody 'iding of a lifetime. Nasty little slut.'

'She might a-gone back to the fairgrounds,' Verity remarked. 'She might be anywhere from York to Bodmin. Contrariwise, she might have got a taste for what Charley Wag put her up to. Them blackmail dodges is easy money for a girl like 'er that doesn't care a fourpenny-bit in the china dog-kennel for what she puts on paper. It don't 'ave to be true. There's a thousand young gentlemen in London, and old 'uns too, that'd pay her a hundred pound rather than have it whispered that they'd dishonoured themselves, even if they never had,'

They finished their gin.

'I'm to walk back,' said Verity to Samson. 'I left the 'ouse in Portman Square before the chains were put on the doors, and I shall go in after they're taken off in the morning. I must start on my way, Mrs Rouncewell, I really must. But I shan't easy forget all the
'elp you gave me and Mr Samson.’

'I'm sure it was nothing, Mr Verity,' said the muscular old woman, 'I only fret for 'aving lost Elaine. Why, she was fed on the best. None o' your padding-ken gruel and slops but lovely rabbit pie. Sich a rabbit-pie! Sich delicate creatures with sich tender limbs that the very bones melt in your mouth and there's no occasion to pick 'em. And for that the little slut run off! Nasty baggage!'

With varying expressions of sympathy for the ingratitude shown by the fifteen-year-old street-girl towards her mistress, Verity and Samson took their leave. Even in the deadest hours of night, the streets just south of the river seemed bright and noisy with buying and selling. At the kerb of the paving stood a block-tin stove baking potatoes for sale to passers-by, a lavish design in coloured lamps erected over it. The kidney-pie stand was advertised by a candle in an oil-paper lantern with characters crudely drawn. One of the ragged boys gathered under the canvas blind of the cheesemonger's shop, earned a penny a night by running to fetch a light from the wine vaults each time the candle blew out. Under the flaring gaslights, the watermen from the Blackfriars Wharf returned with dim and dirty lanterns in their hands and trudged to the ill-lit doors of 'watering-houses' for pipes and rum shrubs.

'You ain't struck a lot of luck, Mr Verity,' said Samson kindly. 'I shouldn't wonder if you wasn't glad to get back to the division. Specially since you was hired under false pretences.'

'Gammon,' said Verity, striding in time with Samson. 'All gammon.'

Samson chuckled.

'Far from uncovering evidence of blackmail, my old son, you helped to suppress it.' "ow d'yer mean?'

'Lay you odds,' said Samson, 'your Mr Jervis wasn't worried whether Lord 'enry died accidental or not. But he knew there was evidence of blackmail and he wanted it found. So he hires you for an investigation, knowing a detective officer is the most likely to find it. Then, when it's found, he destroys it and calls you a liar for saying it ever existed.'

Verity shook his head.

'Not if you'd seen Mr Richard Jervis,' he said softly.

'Lay you odds
?' Samson suggested hopefully. ‘
I ain't a gamester, Mr Samson. Never was and never will be.'

There was another silence which continued as the two sergeants crossed London Bridge. In the recesses above the piers of the bridge, in arches, and doorless hovels, the destitute huddled in shapeless masses. The mist hanging over the river surface deepened the red glow of fires on small craft moored off the wharves, rendering more dark and indistinct the murky buildings on either bank. Warehouses, stained by smoke, rose heavy and dull from the mass of roofs and gables, among which the tower of St Saviour's and the spire of St Magnus struck three o'clock on the night air. A forest of masts rose from the shipping below, as though in reflection of the thickly scattered spires of churches above.

'Mr Samson,' said Verity softly, 'if you wanted the body of a dead man, 'ow would you go about the business?'

'I s'pose I'd go to an anatomist like men that walk the public hospitals do.'

'No,' said Verity impatiently, 'what would you do if you wanted the body of one man in particular?'

Samson's face creased in suspicion and alarm.

'Opening tombs?' he said. 'Snatching corpses?'

'No, Mr Samson. Legal.'

'Whose body might you want to examine, then?'

'Lord Henry Jervis,' said Verity with a scowl.

Samson threw back his head with a guffaw that roused the sleepers in the niches of the bridge and set them shifting uneasily.

'Cor,' he said at length, 'you ain't 'alf a caution, my son.'

'Nevermind that, Mr Samson, 'ow might it be done?'

'Well,' said Samson jovially, 'seeing that the corpse you wish to question is a peer o' the realm, you might first ask his guv'nor. Not Mr Jervis in this case but Lord William. If 'e ain't averse to his brother being uncoffined, then he might ask the Home Office to please grant an exhumation order. Or you might ask Mr Croaker to ask them. Only thing is,' said Samson smugly, 'Home Offices are apt to be fussy about having their clients dug up all over the place and seeing Kensal Green turned into a 'oliday fair."

'I never even seen Lord William,' said Verity thoughtfully. 'I got no idea how he'd take to it.'

'Likewise,' said Samson blithely, 'you might cut a caper my way.'