The Humbug Murders

by L. J. Oliver

  “And Mr. Shen would not be pleased if Miss Pearl learned what he was up to in the Quarter.”

  “And who with. Come, Mr. Dickens. Let’s visit the Chinaman straight away!”

  Dickens had warned me that gaining an audience with Shen Kai-Rui at his offices within the East India Trade Company would be difficult, as his attempts thus far had proven fruitless. And so I was pleasantly surprised when a smiling bearded gentleman greeted us warmly and took us to see him directly.

  “I thought you said you hadn’t yet applied our leverage against Mr. Shen when you sent word we were coming,” I whispered.

  “I didn’t,” Dickens assured me.

  I snorted with pleasure. Clearly, our easy access today was because I’d accompanied the annoying young reporter. My name had become associated with that of George Sunderland, after all.

  If I was correct, then the unpleasantness we planned to unleash against our host might not be needed after all. Not that I would have minded making Shen squirm a bit. Until now, he hadn’t revealed a polite or decent bone in him, and his lascivious fixation on poor Miss Pearl made my flesh crawl.

  The bearded man, an usher, led us across the large, open atrium inside the opulent East India House. Pushing open the heavy doors to one of the many internal offices, he announced us.

  “Yes, of course!” said Shen, laughing and smiling as he rose out of his leather chair. “Of course, do come in. Thank you, Fredrick.” The usher nodded curtly and left, closing the doors with a thud behind us.

  Shen strode to a marble mantelpiece at the back of the spacious office and removed the stopper from a crystal decanter. He filled a single glass with a smooth amber liquid and replaced the stopper with a clink. When he turned to us again, his expression had returned to the cold, angry glare I had come to associate with him. Now that we were away from prying eyes, he had abandoned the charming façade that had no doubt helped him rise so quickly in his company’s ranks.

  “Understand—you have ten minutes, not a second more,” he said curtly, taking a sip of his drink and not bothering to offer Dickens or myself refreshment. “I’m only granting you this audience because the reporter’s grating attempts to see me were becoming tiresome and I wished to put an end to them. What is it you want?”

  A look passed between Dickens and myself. The choice had been the silken glove or the rusty gauntlet.

  Shen had chosen.

  The tradesman sat behind his desk, and we helped ourselves to his liqueurs. His frown deepened as I sipped the drink Dickens had handed me and shuddered as its warm spices scraped the inside of my throat. Dickens knocked his glass back and set the empty crystal to rest on the edge of Shen’s desk.

  “You will show us Fezziwig’s summons,” I told him. “And you will explain your connection to the man and to the others who received that summons. Then you will agree to make certain introductions on our behalf.”

  “Will I?”

  I nodded. “You will.”

  Mr. Shen sat back down in his leather chair and pressed his fingers together in a spire. “I do not understand you British. You want your pound of flesh, which you tell yourselves is justice. Well, you will have it, and soon. I hear the police are satisfied and the trial against the murderer is to be expedited. A rational man would be satisfied with that. The reporter wishing to muckrake, that is unfortunate but understandable in this barbaric country. But a moneylender poking about in these matters . . . what is it, Scrooge? Did the old man die owing you money? I’ve heard you can be quite merciless in such matters.”

  Rage gripped me, but Dickens’ firm hand on my arm steadied me.

  “I can assure you,” Shen went on, “you will find no transfers from Fezziwig’s accounts to mine. Now if that is everything . . .?” He motioned to the door.

  I shook my head. “You must have a low opinion of people if you think they’re all your equals.”

  Dickens flicked open his notepad and poised a pen. “How do you think Miss Nellie Pearl would describe you, Mr. Kai-Rui?”

  Shen rolled his eyes. “It is the other way about in my country. The family name comes first. Truly, I find England’s system of education shockingly inept. For a country that would see itself the center of the civilized world, you’re little more than pigs rooting about in shit, to use your vernacular. In fact, I would say—”

  Unable to tolerate his smugness, I broke in. “We saw you with her last night. In the Royal Quarter. At the Doll House.”

  His hands tightened about one another, knuckles white, his shoulders hunched high. His face remained cold, his eyes suddenly distant.

  “Where do you hide your ring?” asked Dickens. “Did Smithson give it to you personally? What filthy business did you and Miss Pearl get up to in the Doll House? Did you have Miss Annie Piper join you? Did she bring friends?”

  Shen’s breathing quickened, his nostrils flaring in barely suppressed rage. “Leave now or there will be consequences.”

  “Threats?” Dickens asked. “Now who is the barbarian?”

  Dickens and I studied each other for a moment. We had conspired to make Shen believe that we thought he had taken the actual Nellie Pearl to that whorehouse for God only knows what purpose. After all, we very nearly had believed it was her. He might have been willing to risk his own reputation being sullied, but not that of his obsession, Miss Pearl herself.

  “You said you’d left the invitation here in your office,” I reminded him, turning our talk back to less incendiary matters. For now. “Perhaps you can produce it?”

  The Chinaman narrowed his eyes for a split second, then relented. “Quite impossible, I’m afraid! My desk is cleared every evening, paperwork not pertinent to the East India Trade is removed and burned. Nonetheless, I’m quite sure its contents would have been identical to that of the other summonses. You may have better luck with Lord Rutledge.”

  Abandoning his notepad, Dickens put one hand on his pocket and wandered over to the mantelpiece so he was standing directly opposite me on the other side of Shen. He’d assumed such a perfectly uncomfortable position for Shen that the Chinaman would need to keep twisting his head to switch between watching Dickens or me. I inwardly marveled at Dickens’ choreography.

  “Then perhaps you can indulge us with a little history lesson,” Dickens urged. “Your connection with Fezziwig, what of it?”

  Dickens moved slowly along the bookshelves behind Shen’s desk, inspecting the spines, dusting off the surfaces. Every move he made was mirrored by a slight twitch in Shen’s fingers.

  The Chinaman turned back to me and smiled. His hand moved to his belt, hovering slightly above it as if he were about to lunge for a hidden weapon. “I see. You seem to think I’m implicated somehow. The foreigner must be a villain. After all, he’s a foreigner. What a cliché.”

  THUD! Dickens dropped a book on the floor and Shen leaped to his feet.

  “Gosh,” apologized the reporter. “Dropped A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by Francis Grose. Looks like it landed on H.” He picked the book up before Shen could move from behind the desk. “Ah, yes. First entry, Humbug. What a marvelous coincidence! Say, Scrooge, isn’t that just what was written on ‘our friend’s’ wall?”

  “Fine,” Shen said, settling into the leather chair and adopting a calm but stern expression. He glanced at a nearby clock. Our time was running out, which pleased him. “Though I’m afraid you will not find my connection to Fezziwig particularly illuminating, in fact I daresay it is nothing more than humiliating for me. But as you wish.”

  Dickens had flicked his notepad open again and began recording Shen’s account verbatim.

  “I arrived in England as a ship’s cook when I was seventeen. It had been a rough year-long passage, via the Cape of Good Hope, in a trade ship that ironically belonged to the very company I now work for. I was granted a two-month furlough but could not face the prospect of returning to sea. So I decided to stay. I took to the streets, selling penny packets of incense to earn a living. It was a fo
ul life, and with relations between England and China so tense, it wasn’t long before I was attacked by ruffians. Hateful, angry drunkards. They focused their blows on my face, appalled by my appearance, you see, causing me severe concussion. The location of this assault was in Spitalfields.”

  “The millinery’s quarter,” I said. “Where Fezziwig was based.”

  “He found me badly beaten, left for dead, and hauled me back to his house. The concussion was so severe it left me in a semi-conscious state for weeks, and his wife, Jane Fezziwig, nursed me back to health.”

  I nodded, not at all surprised by Reginald’s and Jane’s kindness.

  “There is little more to add beyond that,” he continued. “Fezziwig showed me great kindness even when my own people cared little if I lived or died. He gave me strength, great strength, which I used to rise to my present position, now steering the very company that delivered me here in the first place. In fact, the whole company relies on my connections in Parliament. Thanks to Fezziwig, in part. So you see, when I received his invitation—which gave no particular reason for the visit yet stressed it was urgent I attend—I had no reason to hesitate to see him. As for my surliness, if you would, perhaps it is because I saw him as the one civilized man in this miserable country, and see where it got him. Now, as our time draws to a close, I trust you will keep any mention of an association between Miss Pearl and myself confidential. It would do her reputation no good to be associated with a ‘foreigner.’ ”

  “You mentioned Rutledge,” I reminded him. “Know him well?”

  “I see him at social events. And avoid the bore whenever possible.”

  “And Sunderland?”

  Shen smiled. “Why, Mr. Scrooge, were you not his trusted yet secret confidant? Surely you would know if George had any dealings with East India. Which, naturally enough, he did. But I never dealt with him personally, just a certain Mr. Lazytree and other advocates of his.”

  Dickens stopped scribbling and flicked the pad shut, slipping his pen into his breast pocket, but I was not satisfied. “We seek an audience with a certain Miss Annie Piper. You may know her, you may not. But you possess a ring that grants you access to the most vaunted whorehouse in the city, from what I gather, and Piper is precisely that, a whore.”

  “A whore who has been recruited to the Quarter,” Dickens added. He’d leaped to that conclusion in light of Fagin’s initial hesitation to help us book time with the woman.

  Nodding, I said, “You will arrange an audience for us with Miss Piper. It is vital that we—”

  Shen stood up and slammed his fist on the desk, toppling an inkwell which spilled its contents over the face of a document. Dickens, forgetting to remain “in character” as it were, rushed to help. He lifted the ink-stained document, which Shen promptly snatched from him and pushed him back.

  “Get away! I have answered your questions,” he fumed, lifting the document by its corner and holding it over the wastebasket as black lines of ink dribbled across lines of penmanship. “As to your other ‘request,’ you both can go hang. Even if what you accuse me and Miss Pearl of doing was true, you have no proof. No one in that place would spill for fear of gaining a second smile, this one splitting their throats wide open. It would be your word against ours, and I assure you, the two of you would lose in such a challenge. The slander suits we would launch would then ruin you, be assured of it. Now leave!”

  Dickens’ eyes were fixed on the surface of the desk, at the spot that had previously been covered by the paper Shen was now holding. I tried to follow his gaze, but the dripping ink-stained paper was blocking my view and whatever had caught his attention was hidden from my sight. Where Dickens stood behind Shen, I saw him move a few inches closer and narrow his eyes, straining to read something.

  “No, wait,” Shen hissed, his brow tightly knotted and his brown eyes flashing. “I will give you one final nugget of information. Unless you promptly forget whatever it is you think you’ve learned about a certain Mr. Smithson, the Doll House, or any other establishment in that area of London, you will soon find yourselves plucked, gutted, and stuffed like a Christmas goose. Have I stated that matter simply and clearly enough for you gwai lo?”

  Dickens smiled. He clearly understood the slight. “Foreign devils, yes, that is us.”

  I caught Dickens’ eye, and he nodded.

  “Please accept our apologies, Mr. Shen,” I said, bowing in a sardonic and hopefully insulting manner. “Perhaps we have been a little over-zealous.” I strode to the door. “Of course, I can’t help but wonder, in your country, what do they call a man who, when he can’t gain the attention of a certain lovely he desires, instead paints up a cheap tart to look like her, then parades her around a place like the Doll House, all the time smiling like a strutting goose?”

  “Merry Christmas!” called Dickens over his shoulder as we left. We received no response.

  Once outside, Dickens grabbed my arm. “So much for being careful. Did you have to say those things? He might be dangerous!”

  “What was under that sheet of paper you spotted in Shen’s office?” I asked.

  He calmed, and excited curiosity burned in his eyes. “The envelope. The summons from Fezziwig.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “It had Fezziwig’s monogram on it, of course. And there was something else, too,” he said.

  “Well?”

  Quick as a flash, using a sleight of hand I had not seen the reporter display before, he produced a brass key.

  “To Shen’s office?” I asked.

  “As likely as any other door,” said Dickens. He lowered his head and ushered me into a shadowy alcove. He nodded to the company’s front door, which Shen slammed behind himself as he stormed from his place of employment and stalked down the street away from us. “Hopefully he’ll be gone long enough for us to put it to the test when we go back to get a better look at things.”

  “Breaking and entering,” I mumbled. This was getting darker by the hour. Although Dickens might have been used to this kind of thing when pursuing a line of investigative journalism, I certainly was not. Yet, what other solution was there? Three more would die! And then me.

  A furious drumroll erupted suddenly as horse hooves thundered towards us under a beast with steaming nostrils. I grabbed Dickens’ jacket and yanked him out of the way seconds before we would have been pummeled to death, both of us slipping on the icy cobbles and landing painfully just as the horse’s police wagon came to a stop.

  “Watch it!” yelled a voice.

  I detangled myself from Dickens’ limbs and stared into the cold eyes of Constable Crabapple.

  “What are you doing here, Scrooge? Never mind!” he shouted down at me. “It’s an emergency, get in. You ain’t going to like this, Scrooge, and neither is poor Miss Owen. It’s concerning Thomas Guilfoyle . . . and it’s most alarming!”

  Dickens excused himself and I boarded the carriage.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked. I looked back, and Dickens was now following Shen, though at a considerable and discreet distance.

  “The wages of sin,” Crabapple said. “The very wages of sin itself! Our only viable murder suspect attacked at the courthouse by a figure out of nightmare. Right there in the holding cell! A black cloak, sir, black veil, white bony hands, exactly as Guilfoyle himself had described!”

  And with that, we were off in a flash, the carriage bolting and skidding into traffic.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  OUR STEPS ECHOED off the cold stone walls as Adelaide and I were escorted down a narrow corridor to the ward where Tom was recovering. I could hear Adelaide’s breathing, mechanical and composed, like she was consciously commanding each intake lest she lose control and crumble into fits of tears. “Her Tom” was locked in a coma, imprisoned in his own mind as his broken body attempted to crawl its way back from death.

  Many more will die, then you, Ebenezer, Fezziwig’s spirit had promised. I had thought Sunderland to be the first of t
hese, but now I knew I’d been mistaken. His death had been misfortune, nothing more. And now Tom, yet clinging on to life. Humbug had clearly meant to butcher the poor boy; the word HUMBUG was half-written beside his twitching form, and in the victim’s own blood.

  Humbug had fled out another door, its work unfinished as Guilfoyle clung to life.

  Because Tom was a murder suspect, and the prison hospital had no facilities to treat patients with such severe injuries, he had been admitted to a lunatic asylum near London Bridge. Here experimental technology was employed to aid medical progress and thus Tom would have some chance of a full recovery. The danger of hanging had not yet completely passed. Crabapple stubbornly assured me that there was still a chance that his neck, once fully recovered, would eventually be stretched for Fezziwig’s murder. This second killer might be an accomplice, Crabapple theorized, who feared Guilfoyle would eventually break under questioning and reveal his name or other damning facts.

  In direct opposition to Crabapple’s view, headlines spurred by Dickens’ take on things boldly proclaimed, “HUMBUG KILLER STRIKES AGAIN!” “INNOCENT MAN ATTACKED!” “POLICE MISTAKEN—CRABAPPLE LOSES FACE!” The articles sported sketches of the cloaked figure with its impossibly long, bony fingers. All it needed was a scythe and it might have been the Angel of Death itself. By late tonight, the penny dreadfuls would certainly be running lurid stories of the butcher of London.

  My only surprise was that Crabapple had not yet asked me for an alibi as to my whereabouts during Mr. Guilfoyle’s attack. But all good things to those who wait.

  And as I looked to poor Adelaide, I could see that waiting, and the terrible anticipation of seeing “her Tom” maimed in some unspeakable manner that had not yet been revealed to us, was taking its toll. The matron of the institution scurried along a few steps ahead of us, a large ring of heavy iron keys clanging as it slapped against her swinging hips. The high-pitched piercing of a Christmas jingle she was whistling, seemingly oblivious to Adelaide’s suffering behind her, mingled with distant wails and hollow groans coming from behind locked doors on either side.