The Hourglass Factory (15 page)

‘Sixpence,’ he repeated, and held out a fleshy palm.

Frantically Frankie checked her pockets, inner and outer, and her shoes, remembering she had left her change at the tube ticket office. Nothing. ‘Please, is Ebony Diamond there?’

‘She’s not on tonight. She’s at the Coliseum.’

‘She’s not. She’s gone. I’ve been there. Please, it could be life or death. I need to see the boy.’

The large man looked greatly amused. ‘If you want to see a boy,’ he said, nodding with a glint at Frankie’s crotch, ‘believe me it’ll cost you a lot more than
sixpence. Even round here.’ He laughed, showing the huge cavern of his maw, and gestured out towards the main road where the red shadows were denser and darker. ‘Now, be off with
you.’

Frankie tried to peer over each of his shoulders, but both times he blocked her view. The warmth of the club was creeping through the open doors, damp and full, and she wondered whether once
inside she would even have any chance of finding the ginger boy among the hive of revellers.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow, you mark me.’ She pointed a finger towards the man’s weathered face. Through drink or age some of the large veins had popped on his nose, giving
his skin the look of blue cheese. He flicked her finger away.

‘Tell that boy . . .’ she started.

‘Oh, I will.’ He winked salaciously.

Shivering with the cold, the wet, and her rage, Frankie retreated back down the street. She took a moment to gather her breath, then deciding there was nothing more for it, began to pick her way
back through Soho, for the second time in as many nights, towards home.

Frankie’s fingers were still trembling as she bent over a pail of steaming water in the bathroom and scrubbed the back of her neck. It was past midnight. Her body tingled
with electricity, thoughts swam in her head. Ebony Diamond had seen her own death that evening, as surely as she had seen that tiger prowling below her. She must have loosened the trapdoor hatch
herself, prepared a landing, said a prayer. Nobby’s notes had said she was a tiger tamer. Animals could be predicted; animals could be trusted in a way humans could not.

The carbolic soap stung her scalp but it felt good getting rid of the dust, the tobacco smell around her and the oil in her hair. When she finished, the water was grey. She picked her clothes up
off the damp floor and wrapped herself in a towel then padded back to her bedroom. The floorboards groaned as she settled at her desk, pulling the Blickensderfer towards her. She had no fresh
sheets of paper left so she uncovered an article about single women’s cookery she had never submitted and loaded it in back to front.

‘Exclusive: Ebony Diamond Escapes Murder.’ She hesitated as she typed the word ‘murder’. Then her tongue ran to her missing tooth. She remembered the day it had been
pulled. The darkness of the waiting room, the smell of blood, the rub of the surgeon’s finger on her gums. That taste, that distinct numbing of cocaine solution. She had felt it on the
leather strap, soaked through. If Ebony had caught it, it would have taken only seconds before her mouth was numbed beyond holding on. What was it she had said? ‘I must be a cat; I must have
nine lives’? Someone was after her and she knew it.

Frankie continued to type, not caring how much noise the keys made, not caring if she was making sense. When she finished, she whipped the paper from the machine and shut the box. Dumping the
two sheets on her desk without bothering to read them through, she stumbled over to her bed and crawled between the blankets. Before she knew it, she was in a deep, nightmarish sleep.

3 November 1912

Frankie woke with a start, realising she hadn’t closed the drapes. A dusty gold cloud of light was pouring in. She checked her pocket-watch. It was ten o’clock.

Clumsily, she pulled on a pair of tweed trousers, a shirt, neckerchief and cardigan and rushed downstairs to see if the post had arrived. On the sideboard at the bottom of the stairs a pile of
letters had been tucked under one of the pot plants, to stop it from falling off as the ‘citizens’ dashed about.

She picked through the pile, feeling for the small brown envelope with the stamp of the
Evening Gazette
and the slender cheque inside. It wasn’t there. A wave of panic passed across
her, as she remembered Mrs Gibbons’s demand for rent. Quickly checking again, she spotted that there was in fact something with her name on it. A folded telegram. She looked closer at the
little blue print in capital letters on the fragile paper and her heart dipped. It said, ‘STONECUTTER STREET STARK.’ On the next line was another word, three extra characters’
worth of cost underlying the message’s urgency; ‘NOW.’

Traffic on Fleet Street was slow at this time of day and as she sat in the back of a hansom cab, with an almost comatose horse plodding through the tangle of omnibuses, Frankie
cursed the newspaperboy who had sped off on the office bicycle she usually borrowed. The printing presses were spewing out first editions of the evening papers; the paper boys were gathering like
geese in the distribution rooms waiting for the bundles of hot newsprint to appear all wrapped up in string. There were Reuters boys on their bicycles weaving in and out of horses and trams.
Runners on dirty motorcycles were taking bundles out to the suburbs. Subs’ boys were already squirrelling first editions of the rival papers back to their masters who were ready to stop the
linotypes at a word and rearrange a paragraph here, an exclusive there, re-write the lower half of the page with stop presses and sports results. The smell on the street was suffocating;
printer’s ink and motor exhaust all but masking the subtler perfume of barber’s soap, coffee stands and hops from the public houses. And the noise; it was as if all the sounds in London
had been squashed into one tiny pocket of street, the roaring basement print machines, the cries of ‘copy’ from open windows, the sound of builders working on shiny new edifices along
the Aldwych, throwing up buildings as tall as dreams.

The hansom stopped abruptly as a man ran across the street clinging to his hat. Frankie leaned forward in the cab for a closer look. On the other side of the road an old man in a raincoat was
making a lewd gesture. ‘That will serve you right for milking our copy, you swine.’

The cabbie hissed at them and summoned the horse on with a snap of the reins. Frankie’s gut lurched as she saw the hapless young journalist still desperately clinging to his hat, pounding
at the door of his own paper with his fist. No one would let him in.

‘Stonecutter Street,’ she directed the cabbie and he swerved them off the main road. She paid him with sixpence, taken from her emergency fund she kept in a slit in the back of the
Blickensderfer case, and straightened the edges of the papers she had brought with her. With a tipping stomach she made her way up the staircase and knocked on Stark’s door.

‘Come,’ the voice spat from inside.

She swallowed and tweaked open the door.

Stark was seated at his desk, bent over a collection of scattered papers, his wide hand fumbling in a pot of blue pencils. He looked oblivious to the clacking tape machine behind him and to the
slumped form of Nobby staring at it. There was a sharpness in his eyes, which he turned now on Frankie as she approached the desk, keeping her papers neatly folded in front of her.

‘Ebony Diamond.’ He un-wedged the monocle from his eye with some difficulty. ‘I wanted a portrait on her, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Frankie kept half an eye on Nobby in the corner.

He looked into the distance. ‘Force-feeding. Matrons. Suffragettes. I think those were the instructions. Tantalising tales from inside the prison. Not difficult.’

Frankie tried to stifle her nerves.

Stark seemed to read her mind. ‘Do you see Nobby over there? He does the Reuters flimsy, he cuts the cable and gives me the stories he thinks are worth looking at. Do you know,
Nobby’s only fourteen years old, isn’t that right, Nobby?’

The boy nodded, his eyes still on the ticking tape.

‘Right now, Miss George, I wouldn’t trust you with Nobby’s job.’

Frankie took a breath. ‘No sir.’

‘Do you have the photograph I asked for?’

Frankie shook her head. Her fingers were beginning to sweat onto her typed copy.

‘Why not?’

‘Miss Diamond was not amenable to having her picture taken.’

Mr Stark’s fat face cracked a nasty smile. ‘Do you think many ex-convicts are?’

‘I wrote up what I thought was an important story.’

Stark was shaking a finger at her. ‘It wasn’t what I asked for, and with forty years in the business I’ll trust my own opinions on what I think’s an important story. And
that’s another thing, where was your damn column?’

‘I only had time to . . . because Ebony was at Smythe’s . . . and—’

He cut her off by placing his fingertips very suddenly and deliberately on the table between them. ‘Do you know why I hired you?’

She shook her head, before realising that was the worst response possible.

‘To prove a point, Miss George. To prove a point. You know W. T. Stead, God rest his soul?’

Frankie’s eyes flicked to the copy of the
Pall Mall Gazette
, open on the desk in front. ‘Yes, sir.’ The former editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette
, famous for his
exposés and political crusades had been something of a hero of Frankie’s.

‘Stead was a good friend of mine. He was a smug bugger and there weren’t many things he was wrong about, unfortunately, but he once said to me, “Edward, never trust a mannish
woman.”’

Frankie shifted her weight and dared to look up at his tiny black eyes. ‘With respect, sir, I know there’s more to Ebony Diamond than she cared to admit. I was following my
instincts.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Frankie, it wasn’t what I asked for. That piece was supposed to be about the grime in prison, women getting held down by other women and force-fed.
I’m here to sell papers, not make up fairy stories about the likeness between cons and murdered prostitutes.’ His fingers furrowed around for something to play with, finding the crusty
edge of the whisky glass.

‘The girl on Tottenham Court Road? She wasn’t a prosti– sorry, sir.’

‘Anyway, whether or not our subs could extract anything from that garbled mess of a portrait I’ll never know. I wasn’t so angry about that as I was about you missing a deadline
on your column.’

‘But Mr Stark, it was supposed to—’

He glared at her. Her stomach began to feel heavy. She couldn’t begin to face the thought that there would be no cheque this week. She would have to bide her time and sneak in and out of
the boarding house after dark. She had a couple of cans of corned beef in her room. She could fry them up on her gas stove, perhaps go via Exmouth Market and beg the dregs of a baker’s
leftovers, or an onion. She realised her mind was wandering and Stark was still talking.

‘I don’t think you realise the full extent of the hot water you’ve put me in. I only gave you half the story about Twinkle when I hired you.’ He sighed and cast a glance
towards Nobby, as if wondering for a second whether he could be trusted to stay. ‘Twinkle was on the verge of suing this newspaper. I can’t go into details but she’s not a woman
whose feathers we like to ruffle. You know who takes the blame whenever this paper is up in court? You know who the buck stops with?’

Frankie cleared her throat.

‘That’s right. You may well cough. But it’s not your behind that’ll be sitting in Bow Street Court, it’s mine. And that’s not something I can risk. As of this
moment you are suspended from this newspaper.’

‘Mr Stark,’ Frankie cried before she could stop herself.

He held up a fat hand. ‘You’re damned lucky you’re not out of a job. I’ll have none of your protests, and don’t you go grovelling to the Savage Club again; that
didn’t impress our publisher last time and it won’t impress him again.’ Frankie’s eyes widened and her lips dropped open involuntarily. ‘Yes, I know about that
escapade, we all do.’

She suddenly found herself unable to meet his eye. Her face felt as if it were beginning to roast. He knew about the Savage Club. How could he know about her trip to the Savage Club?

‘You see, Frankie, your quirks are funny when you’re winning. I’d even go so far as to say they are endearing. But what I don’t think you realise is that this is not a
joke. You’ve been lucky to get where you are. You’ve got pluck more than talent but at some point you’re going to have to understand that following instructions puts food on the
table.’ He took a breath and the cushions of his face seemed to soften a little. ‘Do your job. You’re not an editor, you don’t decide what goes in and what doesn’t. Do
as you’re told, manage your time and for God’s sake learn to accept your limitations. Or next time it will be worse.’

He shoved a copy of yesterday evening’s paper across to her. The paper she had been too nervous to open. The ticker machine suddenly paused for a second and the room became unbearably
silent. Frankie peeled open the rag to page eight. In lieu of her column there was a three-quarter page advert for the Aeolian Orchestrion, a coin-operated pianola with drums, cymbals and
glockenspiels. ‘We were lucky they were ready to stump up the cash,’ he said coldly.

‘But the portrait? The “Ebony Diamond’s life in danger” piece?’

‘I binned it. I told you force-feeding and you gave me some rot about a circus girl who looked like a tom crying over a dead corset maker.’

‘She wasn’t a prostitute. She was a seamstress who worked for Smythe. And don’t you know what happened last night?’

He scratched his balding head. ‘I know very well what happened last night. Ebony Diamond fell off a rotten trapeze and Oswald Stoll’s trying to cover it up. He’s always been
known for his cheap equipment. I hope it bites him where it hurts. Mr Hawkins is on the story already.’

‘Mr Hawkins thought Ebony Diamond had been murdered yesterday. The body was misidentified and he didn’t bother to check. Next night Ebony Diamond disappears. What does that tell you?
Two things. Firstly that—’