Читать книгу Byways to Evil - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 5

CHAPTER 2

It rained during the night—a rain such as London rarely experiences, with savage thrusts of lightning tearing apart the darkness while thunder rolled like the artillery of a besieging army. Water fell in cascading floods. Sleep was impossible, so I lay awake thinking about the search for a ferocious animal among London’s wharves and docks and wondering how Lady Sara could be so certain there was none.

I had no doubt she was right. She always knew; she always saw what no one else saw, or she had information everyone else had overlooked or hadn’t bothered to acquire. Chief Inspector Mewer never seemed able to grasp that fact. With every case she interested herself in, he had to grapple with it anew as though there were something unnatural about a woman from a titled family becoming a criminal investigator.

I tried to think what she could have seen in her scrutiny of the mutilated corpse. Of course I had seen it, also, but it meant nothing to me. Too frequently I lacked the essential bits of knowledge that made deduction possible. Such detective talent as I possessed could be exercised only with intense effort. Lady Sara seemed to use hers with ease though she claimed to have worked as hard as I did in the beginning.

She was often asked how she happened to acquire an interest in crime, and she answered that she came by it honestly—she inherited it. Her mother, Lady Ranisford, the Dowager Countess, was, like so many titled ladies, a great enthusiast of murders and murder trials. It was a life-long interest. One of Lady Sara’s earliest memories was of her mother sending a maid or a footman to buy copies of broadsheets—penny plain or tuppence coloured, the Countess of course bought the tuppence version—or the latest newspaper from street hawkers who shouted an account of a murder. The Countess also was an avid frequenter of murder trials at Old Bailey, one of a number of stylishly dressed, bejewelled ladies of family, position, and wealth who never missed a session of a sensational trial.

Lady Sara vividly recalled her mother’s jubilant return home at a late hour in 1877 with news of a conviction in the sordid Penge murder trial. A man named Louis Staunton had married a feeble-minded girl for her money. Once he gained this, he, his brother, and two females of irregular status had maltreated and starved the poor girl to death.

Lady Ranisford’s delight over the verdict changed to absolute fury at Charles Reade, the author, when he wrote a series of letters for the Daily Telegraph claiming that Staunton was innocent because the wife already had a fatal disease, tubercular meningitis. “As if it were perfectly all right to starve an ill person to death!” the Countess exclaimed indignantly. She banished all of Reade’s books from the house forthwith, a severe hardship on her because she was fond of them, especially The Cloister and the Hearth.

When the Earl of Ranisford was looking for a London town house, it was understandable that his wife would direct his attention to Connaught Place. For one thing, the architect ingeniously placed the entrances in the rear, leaving the splendid terraces with unobstructed views of Hyde Park and allowing access to them from a lightly travelled side street rather than busy Bayswater Road. For another, the address was eminently respectable. Caroline, Princess of Wales, had lived there in the early years of the nineteenth century. Finally, the location—at the convergence of Oxford Street and Park Lane, which earlier had been called Tyburn Street or Tyburn Lane—was the site where the notorious Tyburn Tree once stood. The “tree” had been replaced at an early date by a gallows, and the gallows was repeatedly enlarged until as many as twenty-four criminals could be hanged there simultaneously. The place had been the nemesis of London’s convicted malefactors from the twelfth century until 1783 when the gallows was moved to Newgate Prison. It was estimated that as many as sixty thousand people were executed at Tyburn over the centuries.

If this weren’t titillation enough for a murder enthusiast, during the excavation for the Connaught Place terraces, quantities of human bones were uncovered, relics of those same malefactors. At least a cartload was hauled away to be buried in a pit in Connaught Mews. When Lady Ranisford discovered this, the Connaught Place address became irresistible to her.

But Lady Ranisford’s interest in sensational crimes could not begin to account for Lady Sara’s amazing talent for serious criminal investigation. Lord Anstee, a long-time friend of the Earl of Ranisford and Lady Sara’s confidant after her father died, once told me this about her: “The first thing you must understand is that she is brilliant. She has blazing intelligence—one of the best minds in England. I would go book with her against the best. And because she was born a woman, she grew up with nothing for that wonderful mind to do. Women doctors are a rarity; they were almost unheard of when she was young. Nursing was becoming a recognized profession, thanks to Florence Nightingale, but it was still battling for respectability, and it was no career for a noblewoman. Other than that, there was nothing. It wasn’t even possible for women to obtain a good education without extraordinary effort. Oxford and Cambridge grudgingly allowed them to attend lectures and take university examinations, but even today, at the beginning of the twentieth century, women aren’t eligible for degrees at either place, no matter how much higher their scores are than those of the men competing with them. What was she to do?

“People who know very little about her work say she has made a hobby of crime. They could not be more mistaken. She has made a profession of it, and the profession is one she invented herself. She applies research, along with analysis and synthesis, to criminal investigations—not the ordinary kind of research done in libraries nor the analysis and synthesis practised in laboratories, but an intense mental application that brings the full spectrum of human knowledge to bear on criminological problems, even including such a newfangled thing as psychological medicine. She had one enormous advantage—her social position and wealth opened doors that otherwise would have remained tightly shut, and it also enabled her to call upon the many professional men and scholars of her acquaintance for assistance. Scotland Yard can’t begin to match her resources. She is the only investigator in the world who works like this, but she will never receive credit for it because she is a woman.”

Most of her titled friends thought she had an eccentric quirk for solving mysteries—certainly an odd pastime for a person in her position but a harmless one. They condescendingly came to her for assistance with their own petty domestic and business puzzles. Few of them had any conception of the enormous scope of Lady Sara’s activity, or they would have considered it far more disreputable than acting.

Her greatest difficulty was and always had been gaining professional respect from the men she had to work with. It was a challenge she faced anew each time she encountered another pompous ass in a position of authority. Lord Anstee described a confrontation he had witnessed between Lady Sara and two of Scotland Yard’s assistant commissioners: “She encouraged them to talk until they had made resounding fools of themselves. Then she began to ask questions neither of them could answer. When she had them sufficiently embarrassed, she answered the questions herself, and from that point they had to listen to her.”

That may have been her method with politicians and bureaucrats; where artists, or scientists, or professional men were concerned, she encouraged them to talk because she wanted to know what they knew. Her memory was astonishing, and that, coupled with her wonderful intelligence, enabled her to analyze and compare things no one else noticed. She delighted in assembling a panel of experts, hearing everything they had to say on a subject, and then watching with amusement while they argued themselves into a conclusion she had already arrived at.

Lady Sara’s headquarters were in nearby Connaught Mews, where a block of stables had been remodelled to meet her requirements. The end rooms on the first floor, formerly the quarters of grooms and coachmen, were now a comfortable apartment where her sometimes highly irregular comings and goings, at all hours and in odd dress or actual disguise, would not perplex her mother’s staid servants or titled guests.

The ground floor below, which had been occupied by stables, had become her workrooms, and it contained a study as well as a laboratory where all kinds of odd experiments and investigations were conducted.

Adjoining Lady Sara’s headquarters were apartments for her employees, including my own residence. Beyond these were carriage houses, stables, and more living quarters for employees. Lady Sara owned a carriage as well as her own private cabs, both hansom and four wheeler, which meant she was always prepared for whatever kind of foray a crisis called for. In addition, there was a cart that could be adapted to various highly useful functions, from impersonating a greengrocer to costermongering.

She also owned a splendid Spider Phaeton that she favoured for her own daytime excursions because it was a socially acceptable vehicle for a woman to drive. She could take the reins herself and occasion no more severe criticism from her mother’s friends than “There goes Lady Sara being eccentric again.” Once out of their sight, her driving became decidedly unladylike. I often occupied the phaeton’s rear seat garbed as her groom.

She kept six horses and a donkey, which made it possible for her employees to use several vehicles simultaneously if an investigation, or several investigations, required it.

Lady Sara had remarked that the case of the two giants might be one for the board. The “board” she referred to was the world’s largest cribbage board. It had been designed by Burke Varnley, her father, a cribbage fanatic from the moment he learned the game as a child until his death.

The Earl had two passions in life—besides women, his Countess would have quickly added—cribbage and eating. He acquired the latter obsession in Spain at Madrid’s famous Restaurante Botin. That venerable establishment introduced the Earl to many delicacies he was fond of describing in lyrical terms, but its great specialty, and the Earl’s favorite, was cochinillo asado, roast suckling pig.

When, much later, he learned that the invention of cribbage was ascribed to Sir John Suckling, a seventeenth century poet and cavalier with the army of Charles I, the notion that the inventor of his favourite pastime had the same name as his favorite food came to him as a revelation. He considered it a divine command to merge his two passions.

He founded the Suckling Club, which offered its members an elaborate roast suckling dinner weekly and access to Sir John Suckling’s game at all hours. Unfortunately, true gourmets rarely proved to be cribbage players. They were more prone to nap after a meal than gather around a board for a challenging session of cribbage, and the club was not a success.

The Earl invented a six-handed game of cribbage especially for the Suckling Club. It required the enormous cribbage board and three packs of cards. The board had rarely been used because of the difficulty the Earl experienced in assembling six players of the quality he insisted on. Now Lady Sara kept the board in the centre of a large oval conference table in her study, and she used it to peg her progress in her more important investigations. She could keep six cases going at once on it, but she rarely had more than one or two that were sufficiently interesting to merit a place there. The board was more than six feet long and used pegs almost as large as a man’s fingers, and the six tracks, of 121 holes each, looped and entwined to form fantastic patterns. I often wondered how the Earl’s inebriated friends—which, according to his Countess, they frequently were—had accurately pegged their points on that complicated board.

Because the tracks were so convoluted, Lady Sara referred to them as byways—her Byways to Evil.

If criminal investigation was an unusual pastime for a noblewoman, so was my presence in Lady Sara’s household. As her principal assistant, I considered myself the most fortunate of mortals. In inventing a profession for herself, she also devised one for me. But first she had to invent me!

I remember very little of my early childhood. I have read that a baby is born in London every five minutes, and it is only to be expected that most of them arrive in undistinguished homes. It was not quite correct to say I was a street arab—a homeless, unwanted child—from birth. Someone wanted and loved me, and cared for me, and kept me in health until the age of three or so. Then both my parents died. Whether they met death separately or together, from sickness or from an accident, I have no recollection. I find it difficult to believe they simply abandoned the child they had loved and cared for until then. Since I have neither records nor recollections of them, I can only assume they had no relatives or close friends, and their suddenly orphaned child somehow got overlooked. The East End was a crowded place—much more crowded then than now—and there were far too many homeless, parentless children about anyway. One more or less made no difference.

I must have wandered for a time, desperately seeking food and shelter, and I had the astonishing luck not only to survive but to escape the kind clutches of the various charitable organizations intended to succour children in my situation. Dr. Barnardo’s National Waifs Association would have cared for me and taught me a manual trade—and stultified my imagination. A number of similar organizations that look after homeless children, such as the Orphan Working School, Princess Mary’s Village Homes, the Church of England Association for Befriending Waifs and Strays, or the Metropolitan and City Police Orphanage, would have taken me in, but I managed to avoid them. An even worse fate would have been to fall into the hands of charities like the Marine Society, which prepared homeless boys for careers as sailors, or Miss Annie Macpherson’s Home of Industry, which would have trained me and then sent me to Canada for a new start in life.

Fate guided my steps. I escaped all of the well-intentioned societies and sought refuge in the cattle-shed of an Irish dairyman. He and his wife were childless, kindly people of middle age—poor, of course, but I had never known anyone who wasn’t. They adopted me, jokingly calling me Colin Kine—Colin meaning child or young animal, and kine being their word for cattle. Colin Kine I remained until, long afterward, Lady Sara’s coachman adopted me. The dairyman and his wife had a surname of their own, but it never occurred to me that I had any claim to it.

I already had my start in life. I was learning the shabby parts of London as few people ever know them.

When I was eight or nine, my adoptive parents died of a fever, perhaps typhoid. Sickness and death were and are an ever-present reality to the London poor. I was sick myself but survived. Perhaps my foster parents fed and cared for me better than for themselves. The relative who took over their dairy business didn’t like my looks, and I didn’t care for his, so I left. My luck at avoiding well-intentioned charities continued. Simply by surviving in the London streets, I continued to educate myself as though I were deliberately preparing for the career I eventually followed.

I must have been almost twelve when I met Lady Sara. I had happened onto a crowd of boys tormenting a dog that had been run over by a carriage. When they wouldn’t stop, I attacked the whole group in a fury, even though several were larger than I. In the end, with both eyes blackened and a bloody mouth, I routed all of them.

Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “Bring that boy here.” Her coachman grabbed me and took me to her carriage. She had watched the entire fracas, not intervening until it was over because she wanted to know what the outcome would be. She asked my name.

“Colin Kine, Ma’am.”

“Where did you get a name like that?”

“I useter to look after cows, Ma’am.”

“It’s the wrong name for you. You deserve something heroic. It takes character to fight a mob over an injured mongrel.”

She continued to question me. When she found I had no parents and no home, she opened the carriage door. “That won’t do. Come along—I’ll find a place for you.” She was given to such kind impulses, and she always made up her mind quickly.

She seemed as beautiful as a fairy princess, and the carriage and coachman marked her as fabulously wealthy, but none of that meant anything to me. My mind was still on the dog. I said, “Please, Ma’am, I wants to look after the dog.”

She regarded me with interest. “Of course. That was the cause of it all, wasn’t it? We mustn’t forget the dog. I’m afraid it has a broken leg, but something might be done for it. Bring it along.”

We drove directly to the Harley Street surgery of Thomas Tallmage, who was one of London’s most prominent young physicians. Once Lady Sara made up her mind to succour a mongrel dog, it wouldn’t have occurred to her to offer it anything but the best medical care available. As Dr. Tallmage himself said, laughing, when he learned what our errand was, “Lady Sara never does anything by halves!” He expertly reduced the dog’s fracture, and Lady Sara took it and me home with her. At that time she was still living in Connaught Place, so the street urchin and the mongrel joined the household of Earl of Ranisford, to the consternation of the Countess, her mother.

But it was quickly evident that I could not be comfortable in such a fashionable residence. I was removed to Connaught Mews to the home of Lady Sara’s coachman, John Quick, who even then was known as Old John. He and his wife were wonderful people, and their own children were grown-up. Old John was almost as vain about his surname as he was about being Lady Sara’s coachman. He claimed to be descended from Robert le Quic, of Cornwall, a thirteenth century notable and the first of a long line of nimble ancestors. At Lady Sara’s suggestion, he formally adopted me, and I proudly became Colin Quick.

Old John and his wife looked after me like a father and mother, but Lady Sara took the responsibility for my education and employment. She began by giving me menial chores to perform in her workrooms. When I demonstrated some potential, she began to trust me with more complicated tasks. The dog and I became known all over London. Much of my education developed out of the errands she gave me. She also took me with her when she travelled about the city, pointing out things and questioning my reactions.

The errands were odder than I realized, and as I grew older, I gradually began to grasp the strangeness of this profession she had invented for herself. At the same time, there were large quantities of book learning for me to catch up with, and in this, as with everything else, she was a stern taskmaster. For one thing, I had to master different accents and dialects. My native cockney was invaluable but only when I was supposed to be one. Anywhere in the West End, or in fashionable society, or even in a middle-class suburb, it marked me disastrously. My struggles with English grammar, which I learned from a book by a Mr. Meiklejohn, will haunt me all my life. Pitman’s Shorthand Dictionary became my support in matters of pronunciation, a useful connection because as soon as I had the rudiments of reading and writing, Lady Sara set me to learning Pitman’s shorthand. As my skills improved, she began calling me her secretary when she needed one, and she kept drilling me intensely at shorthand until I had attained a speed somewhat better than a hundred and fifty words a minute. She was not about to lose valuable testimony because her secretary couldn’t keep pace with a witness.

I was indebted to the Countess, Lady Sara’s mother, for another important aspect of my education. The Countess frequently asked me to accompany her on shopping expeditions, ostensibly to run errands but actually to receive instruction in matters she suspected Lady Sara was neglecting.

She knew the city as few people knew it, but the attractions of London that interested her most were not listed in an ordinary visitors’ guide. They were places known and cherished only by connoisseurs such as herself: the dwelling celebrated for its strange assortment of ghosts; the public house outside which, ten years previously, the dead body of a man had been found in the gutter, his throat cut and a half-guinea piece clenched between his teeth; the place where the poisoner Neill Cream met one of his victims; the theatre where, concealed at the back of a closet, a skeleton had been found with a knife between its ribs; the square in Highgate haunted by the ghost of the chicken Sir Francis Bacon had beheaded and used for his famous experiment to prove that stuffing a carcass with snow would preserve it. The Countess had an amazing repertoire of such tales, and she knew where each had occurred.

Lady Sara drove me to master an entire curriculum of skills and disciplines until I became a capable investigator myself though certainly not on her level. She had invented the profession; she invented me because she needed an assistant. She solved crime after crime—some highly public and some in the highest degree confidential; some of utmost importance and many trivial—and for most of these triumphs she received no credit or acknowledgement of any kind. Only a few of her closest friends and associates were aware of her achievements. Whether a mystery concerned missing jewellery or a fortune in stolen goods, it posed a question mark and a challenge. Lady Sara made a career of removing such question marks, and her success was the only reward she required.

Now she had three unusually sinister problems to consider: the missing giant, who might be rusticating in a peaceful rural surrounding where his unusual size was accepted or who might be hiding somewhere in the depths of the London Underworld and waiting to strike again; the beast in human form who deliberately mutilated his victim; and the river thefts in which large quantities of valuable merchandise was stolen without leaving a trace.

It was too early to say what Lady Sara intended to do about the missing giant or whether she would leave the Shadwell murder to Chief Inspector Mewer. As for the river thefts, we had hardly begun our investigation. We were still attempting to understand the problem. The one thing we knew for certain was that solving them would not be easy.

“If it were, the shippers and importers would handle it themselves,” Lady Sara said.

A hundred years earlier, thievery in the old Port of London had become a national scandal. Ships’ crews were bribed routinely; waterside workers regularly joined the thieves in pilfering cargos. More than half a million pounds worth of goods was stolen annually, most notably from West Indian ships loaded with rum, sugar, and tobacco. Part of the problem was London’s ancient restrictions on imports, which required that all ships be unloaded between London Bridge and the Tower.

The modern dock system, with docks built like fortresses, was the result. Ships could be unloaded quickly, and large-scale theft was practically eliminated. Obviously someone had found chinks in the system, though as far as we knew, the major docks had not yet been victimized.

None of those chinks had been visible from a police steam-launch. On the morrow, I would find out whether there was more to be seen from a slow-moving, oared galley.

The storm faded, finally, and I dozed off still futilely puzzling over the mysteriously vanished merchandise from the river warehouses.