The Darkest Walk of Crime (2 page)

Taking a step back, Restiaux
tried again, this time grunting with satisfaction as the wood splintered.
“That’s it! Light!”

Mendick’s lantern illuminated
the panel, and in a series of short, savage kicks, Restiaux created a jagged
hole. Kneeling, he thrust his arm through and withdrew an iron bolt.

“Stand aside, sergeant!”
Williamson pushed past, staff in hand.

“Be careful, you young
blockhead!” Restiaux warned, but Williamson clattered ahead, his boots echoing
on a flight of stone steps that led downward to a black abyss. The stench of
dampness and human waste rose to greet them. Restiaux shook his head.

“Shine that light just ahead of
me, Mendick, and don’t stray. God alone knows what’s down here.” He produced a
pistol from his pocket. With its four inch barrel and wide muzzle, the weapon
would be deadly at close range. “This barker has a three quarter inch bore, so
it can stop an elephant dead, but let’s hope we don’t need it.” With the pistol
held in his right hand, he began the descent.

“Blake’s the most efficient
forger you’ll never want to meet,” Foster said quietly, “but I need him alive,
not face up in a coffin.” He glowered at Restiaux. “He’s far too valuable.”

“So are my men,” Restiaux said
bluntly. “So if he is a threat to any of us, I won’t hesitate to shoot him.”
Turning his back on the detective, he nodded to Mendick. “Ready?”

“Aye.” Mendick looked into the
darkness ahead. He did not feel ready, but did it really matter?

The lantern light picked out
crumbling stone steps descending through darkness into a stink that seemed so
tangible it could be cut up and packaged. There was a loud cry ahead, a hollow
shout that echoed for agonisingly long seconds.

“Williamson!” Restiaux yelled,
but there was only the sound of scurrying footsteps, followed by solid silence.

“What the hell’s happening?”
Foster sounded alarmed as he tapped the blackjack against the wall. He peered
narrow-eyed down the steps.

“Williamson!” Restiaux called
again, but the empty echo mocked him. He lowered his voice. “It looks like
there’s trouble ahead; have you anything more lethal than your staff?”

“Yes, Sergeant.” Mendick patted
his shoulder holster, where his pistol nestled uncomfortably but reassuringly
against his breast. Emma had never been happy with his choice of profession,
but she had insisted that he should at least be prepared for trouble.

Restiaux nodded. “After me then,
and don’t worry about taking Blake alive.” He ignored Foster’s savage glare.

Testing each step, they
negotiated the remaining twenty stairs with the light flickering and bouncing
from chipped stone and crumbling mortar.

“What’s that?” Foster pointed to
a darker shadow ahead.

“It’s Williamson.”

The constable lay crumpled across
the bottom step, blood oozing from a ragged wound in his scalp. Beyond him,
faint light flickered and coarse voices grumbled from behind a closed door.

“I told him to wait!” Kneeling
at Williamson’s side, Restiaux checked his pulse. “He’s alive, thank God.” He
glanced at the door, and grunted. “Spring your rattle.”

Hauling the rattle from his
inside pocket, Mendick swung it around his head. The spring pressed a wooden
tongue against a ratchet wheel, creating a distinctive sound that would
immediately summon all available police constables.

“Christ, man, that noise will
warn anybody for half a mile.” Foster looked behind him to the cruelly crowding
dark.

“That’s the idea. Now, follow
closely and mind your backs!” Restiaux poised himself then kicked open the door
and rushed through, his pistol levelled in front of him.

From the darkness of the
stairway they rushed into a scene of which Dante would have been proud. Lit by
the guttering remains of three candles, a mass of human bodies covered the
floor of a low room and piled onto a grease-darkened bench. There were men and
women of all ages from twelve to sixty, some whitely naked, others clad in
itching rags and one in the remains of a clerical suit. Some were stirring,
rising from torpidity to suspicion as they struggled to see who had entered,
but others merely glanced up and returned to the anonymity of the mass.

“He’s not here,” Foster said at
once and prepared to move on, but Restiaux placed a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“Wait. Somebody will know,” he
advised, and raised his voice: “We’re looking for Thomas Blake!”

Mendick flashed the lantern
across the chaos, catching a poisonous eye, a scarred back, a tangled mess of
lousy hair or the slender curve of breast or buttock.

“Who?” the man in the suit
asked, blinking as the light focussed on his face.

“Flash Tom,” Restiaux said. “You
know him.”

When the man shook his head,
Restiaux sighed. “Remind him, Constable.”

“Yes, Sergeant.” Pulling his
staff from its pocket, Mendick stepped forward, ignoring the squeal as his
nailed boot thumped on the leg of a teenage draggletail.

“No!” The clerk cowered
backward, seeking sanctuary from companions who seemed only too eager to allow
him all the attention of the police. “I don’t know him at all!”

“I’m afraid I don’t believe
you.” Mendick pressed the rounded edge of his staff, with the VR lettering in
faded gold, hard against the clerk’s chin. “Where is Thomas Blake?”

“I don’t know,” the clerk said,
but for a second his eyes flickered toward a door at the far end of the room.

“Thank you,”
Mendick kept
his voice dry as he stepped over the cleric. “This way, Sergeant. You too,
Sergeant Foster, if you will.” He treated the Scotland Yard detective with
cautious respect.

“I hope Flash Tom kills you
both.” Covering herself with what looked like a handful of rags, a woman
pointed a long-nailed finger at Mendick. “I hope you die squealing, you Peeler
bastard.”

“If there is any trouble from
you or anybody else in this room,” Restiaux told her quietly, “you’ll be in the
Bower before this day’s finished.”

The woman closed her mouth and
sat down with a thump, her eyes screaming hatred.

“Right, Constable, lead on.”
Foster glanced over his shoulder as a cacophony of curses came from the room
behind them. “Christ but I hate this job.”

They plunged through the door
into a short passage, scented with sewage and punctured with three dark
openings.

“Which one?” Mendick allowed the
beam of the lantern to linger over each doorway in turn.

“The nearest,” Restiaux said and
barged in the door. They thundered into another room reeking of human misery as
huddled children stared up from their rags. One boy, his eyes ancient and evil
as Hades, spat at them. The next room held more filth, more destitute people,
more sorrow, but no Thomas Blake.

“We’re wasting time.” Foster
sounded worried.

Restiaux shoved the last door.
“Locked,” he said laconically, and again resorted to his boot. The door
shuddered once, twice, and finally gave with a mighty crash. The lantern probed
ahead, revealing more steps, spiralling upward.

Foster swore foully. “This place
is a maze.”

“Tom! Tom Blake!” Restiaux’s shout
echoed endlessly in the dark. Feeling his way with care, he began the ascent,
pistol held ready to fire. Mendick followed, aware of the clinging dankness and
the sudden alteration in atmosphere. The foetid stench had metamorphosed into
something much worse. He could sense danger, as if unformed evil was hovering
above.

“He’s up there,”
he
whispered, touching the butt of his pistol. Years of experience in the back
slums of London had heightened him to the importance of instinct. If he felt
that something was wrong, then something
was
wrong.

Restiaux nodded. “I know.”

Restiaux was the expert on the Holy
Land. He knew every slithering alley, every crumbling building, every half-human
denizen of the ten rat-run acres that huddled between the soaring spire of St
Giles and the bulk of St George’s church in Bloomsbury. The name Holy Land was
a mockery, taken from the proximity of the churches, but although there were
worse rookeries in London, there were few that gave such easy access to the
more privileged areas of Leicester Square, Regent Street and the Haymarket. For
that reason, the Holy Land was a thieves’ paradise, a devil’s playground of the
downtrodden and the vicious, a Satan’s sanctuary for the pickpockets and
cockchafers, the coves, cracksmen and queer dealers who scraped a dishonest
living by robbing their betters.

“Jesus!” Foster glanced over his
shoulder as somebody unleashed a laugh fit for bedlam. “Please God I live to
see my retirement and a pension.”

The steps ended at a brick wall
pierced by a ragged hole through which a man might just be able to squeeze. A
draught edged aside a fraction of the stench.

“Bastard’s escaped again!”
Foster kicked the wall with his iron-studded boot.

“Lantern,” Restiaux ordered, and
Mendick bent forward, one hand holding his pot hat in place. The light probed
the hole and vanished into the unknown beyond.

“After me, I think; this is my
parish.” Pushing him gently aside, Restiaux took a deep breath and thrust his
head and shoulders through the hole.

The sound of the shot was very
loud in the confined space, and he yelled and fell back cursing.

“Sergeant!” Mendick saw blood on
Restiaux’s face. “Are you all right?”

Restiaux nodded but suddenly
paled and slid downward until he was sitting with his back to the wall.

“Douse the glim,” he said, and
Mendick pulled the metal shutter across the lantern. The sudden darkness
pressed down on them, thick with menace.

Another shot cracked out, the
bullet bouncing from the brick wall behind them and ricocheting dangerously
around their ears. Mendick swore, ducking down, as Restiaux flinched and
covered his head with his arm.

“Tom!” Foster shouted, keeping
back from the hole in the wall. “It’s me, Foster of the Yard. I have other
police officers with me. Better come out quiet now.”

“Bugger you, bluebottle
bastards! Did I kill Restie?” The voice was surprisingly high-pitched.

“No,” Mendick said. “It’s not
the rope yet, Tom. You’ll just get a spell in limbo or maybe a free voyage
across the pond.”

“Twenty-one years I’ll get,
Peeler, twenty-one years of transportation, slaving under the lash in Van
Diemen’s Land. Better the rope than that.” He fired again; the shot splintered
the bricks opposite the hole. Dust drifted over Restiaux, who coughed and wiped
away the blood that trickled down the line of his jaw.

Keeping his head back from the
hole, Mendick eased open the shutter of his lantern to examine the residue left
by the bullet. “Half-inch calibre lead ball,” he said, “and judging by the gap
between the shots, he probably has a single-barrelled pistol.” He raised his
voice, taunting. “You’re trapped, Tom, there’s no escape.”

“Then I’ll die game, Peeler!”

The pistol cracked again; the
ball ripped past Mendick's face. Choking white smoke surged through the hole.
Mendick cocked his pistol and raised his eyebrows toward Restiaux.

Standing flat against the wall,
Foster shook his head. “I want him alive,” he reminded. “I have a particular
task for Flash Tom, so a corpse is no use to me.”

“We’ll try to keep Blake alive,”
Restiaux assured him. “There are forty seconds between each shot, Mendick, and
you’re about the most active officer in the force.” He jerked a thumb toward
the hole. “Could you do it?”

Mendick’s shrug was genuine. “I
can try,” he said, “but not in this hat. Do I have your permission to discard
it, Sergeant?”

Restiaux smiled weakly. “Just
make sure you protect your head.” He put a hand to his head. The blood now
covered the left side of his face and dripped onto his broad leather stock.

The rabbit skin hat weighed
eighteen ounces and was intended as protection against an assailant’s cosh, but
in this confined space it was only an encumbrance. As an afterthought Mendick
shrugged off his swallowtail coat which would catch on every jagged brick.
Taking deep breaths, he crouched at the side of the hole as Foster hugged the
wall. The detective swore softly.

“Are you Peeler bastards still
there?” Tom fired on the last word. As soon as the pistol sounded, Mendick
threw himself into the hole, kicking madly in an attempt to gain momentum. The
wall was thicker than he had expected, and rough brick scraped the flesh from
his outstretched hands as he frantically hauled himself through. He had forty
seconds to reach the screever before Flash Tom finished reloading. Forty
seconds between life and possible death: how long had he already been?

Did it really matter? He
hesitated, embracing death for a fraction of a second, but duty forced him
onwards. Peering into the darkness, he glimpsed a bearded white face and the
blurred hands of somebody urgently working the ramrod of a pistol. The man
looked up, his eyes vicious above a rainbow waistcoat. Mendick scrabbled with
his feet, seeking purchase, as Flash Tom withdrew the ramrod and stepped
backward into the dark. There was a solid click as he cocked the hammer.

“Peeler bastard!” The words were
followed by a torrent of foul vituperation that echoed repulsively around the
dark chamber.

Mendick flinched; with his head
and upper body protruding from the hole, he was hideously vulnerable. “It won’t
do, Tom. If you shoot me, it will be the gallows. Think, man.”

“Gallows or not, bluebottle,
you’re a dead man.” Extending his arm to aim, Tom pressed the trigger just as
Restiaux gave Mendick a final push that propelled him through the hole.  He
gasped as burning powder from the muzzle of the pistol filled the air, but the
ball screamed wide and smashed into crumbling brick. Coughing with the reek of
shrouding smoke, he instinctively rolled away, but Flash Tom did not attack.