“Well,” continued the chief inspector, “it just so happens that you were the last one to be in possession of the Shah of Persia’s diamond.”
Thaddeus felt his blood freeze in his veins. “Sir? Wh– what are you suggesting?”
“Well, my boy, we only have your word for it that the diamond wasn’t in your pocket when you started yelling blue murder. Don’t we?” Glove began to pace, hands in his pockets. “You went running off after a lord and a girl, claiming one of them had nicked it, and ran straight out of the Tower. Of course, no one even contemplated stopping you. Then all of a sudden, you decided that the place to find this girl was the circus. The circus! Where every good man knows that every bad man finds his level. The perfect place, in fact, to fence a stolen jewel if, of course, you had one. Now don’t you think that’s all a little odd, boys, a little… convenient, perhaps?”
There was a murmur of assent among the gathered detectives. Thaddeus cast a fevered look around their familiar faces and suddenly felt as if he were staring at strangers.
“Sir,” he began hoarsely. “Sir, you can’t really believe that of me. This is – sir, this is me!”
Glove stopped pacing and stood before Thaddeus. He looked the younger man up and down once before nodding heavily. “Yes. Yes, it is you, Rec. And I’m sorry to say that I was fool enough to believe that a leopard could change his spots. Now, people may say that it’s admirable – the son of thieves wanting to dedicate his life to the police. I thought so, too, at the time. It’s why I gave you a chance, Rec. I thought you might be a good example to others.” Glove held up his hand to silence the other detectives who had begun to mutter upon hearing this hint about Thaddeus’ past. “But I went too far, didn’t I? Gave you free reign, let you inside, so to speak. Trusted you. Where were you born, Rec?”
Thaddeus blinked. “W– Whitechapel Road, sir.”
“Oh, yes, that’s right. Remind me which house on Whitechapel Road, Rec.”
Thaddeus felt his cheeks burning hot as his vision blurred. The murmuring started again as he shook his head and whispered, “Not in a house, sir. On the street. I was born… on the street.”
“Ah, yes,” said Glove, his eyes gleaming. “I remember now.”
Thaddeus forced himself to straighten up and raise his head, despite his shame. “It doesn’t matter where I came from, sir, and you know it. I’m a good copper.”
The chief inspector crossed his arms. “Is that so? And what, as a ‘good copper’, do you suggest we do now then, Rec?”
“I think we should talk to Lord Abernathy. He was with the girl at the Tower. He might know –”
Glove made a sound of disgust deep in his throat. “So, now you’re proposing to question a lord of the realm, are you, Rec? And Lord Abernathy at that – a pillar of respectable society. You? And what makes you think you have the right to do that? What makes you think you have the right to cast doubt on a noble man?”
Thaddeus frowned. “No – not doubt, sir. But he may know something. Surely it would help?”
“I don’t see how. No, Rec, we’ll not find the culprit among the good society of London. We’ll have to look at the lower orders for that.” Glove paused, looking significantly at Thaddeus. “Which brings us back to you, doesn’t it, Rec? Why did you stay at the circus, after Collins here had realized it was a wild goose chase?”
Thaddeus shut his eyes briefly. “I wanted to find out more about the girl – the trapeze performer.”
“And why did you want to do that?”
“Because I thought there was still a chance that it was the same girl who was at the Tower when the jewel went missing, sir.”
“And what did you find out, then? On this urgent and, if I may say so, probably pointless mission?”
With a shaking hand, Thaddeus took out his notebook and opened it to the page that he’d scrawled on earlier. “I found out her real name, sir. I think we might be able to trace her. Find out if she’s been in trouble for a similar crime before. Her real name is – Moineau Volant.”
Glove froze for a second, frowning. Then he burst into laughter. Thaddeus watched him, confused and not a little afraid.
“Sir?” he asked. “What’s – what’s so funny?”
“That’s her name, is it, Rec? Moineau Volant?”
“Yes, sir – several of the circus folk confirmed it.”
Glove shook his head, his laughter still ringing in Thaddeus’ ears. “It’s not a name, Rec – or at least, it’s not a real one. But then, what should I expect? That a boy born in the sewer would know a refined language like French?” The chief inspector snatched the notepad from his hand, glancing at it before holding it up for all to see. “Moineau Volant, indeed. It means ‘Flying Sparrow’, Rec. Flying Sparrow.”
Flying Sparrow. A second ticked by, empty and cold, and then – Yes, thought Thaddeus, as realization washed over him, followed by dread. Yes. A little bird, indeed, and one who flies through the air every night.
“So, Rec – your sparrow has flown away and, with it, your suspect. Which brings me back to thinking about how the diamond vanished, and who it was with when it did – you.”
Thaddeus stared at his superior officer, feeling everything spinning out of his control. All his colleagues were looking at him, their eyes full of suspicion and disdain. How could they think he took the stone? How could they? More importantly, how could he prove that he didn’t without finding the person who had?
“Chief Inspector – I suggest that you search the circus. It’s there, sir – it must be! You’ll have to move quickly, before they pack up and disappear.”
“And what should I do with you in the meantime, Rec? Let you go free? Let you ‘help’ us find it? Let you wriggle your way out by pinning the theft on someone else?”
For a second, Thaddeus was speechless. Could they really be accusing him of this crime? “Sir,” he said. “I have never stolen a thing in my life. You know I wouldn’t do this.” Glove’s face remained stony. He looked at Collins, instead. “Collins, you know me. You know I wouldn’t!”
Collins shook his head and looked away. “Sorry, son,” he said, quietly. “But I don’t know anything.”
“Take him away, Collins,” said the Chief Inspector. “Thaddeus Rec, you are under arrest for the theft of the Darya-ye Noor –”
“Wait!” Thaddeus shouted desperately, “No, you cannot possibly believe that I –”
“Put him in one of the cells downstairs overnight, Collins,” Glove continued, ignoring Thaddeus. “We’ll all get some rest and question him properly in the morning. He might be more cooperative then.”
“No,” shouted Thaddeus again, “No, wait, I…”
“Come on, boy,” said Collins calmly, placing a hand on Thaddeus’ arm. “Come quietly now. You know the drill. If you’re innocent you’ve got nothing to worry about, have you? Don’t make things worse for yourself, eh? There’s a good lad.”
Rec stared at the older policeman for a moment. He felt as if all the stuffing had been knocked out of him. He loved being a policeman. The detective division had become his life, his whole purpose. And now they had turned on him. All of them. What was the point, if they didn’t believe him now? His shoulders dropped and he nodded at Collins. Together, they walked out of the room, every pair of eyes following their progress.
They were in the cold corridor that led to the cells when Collins stopped.
“Hit me,” he hissed.
Thaddeus stared at him. “What?”
“Come on, boy! Hit me and run! We haven’t got much time!”
“But you said –”
“Aye, I knows what I said. That was for them, weren’t it? Now I’m saying to you, clout me one and scarper before they know what’s happening. You won’t get a fair deal in here – a copper, gone bad, and one born to the streets at
that? They’ll have your guts for garters. You didn’t take it, lad, I know that. You don’t have a bad bone in you. But in here, you’ll never prove it. So come on – hit me!”
Thaddeus shook his head. “I can’t!”
Collins grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him hard. “For god’s sake! They’ll hang you out to dry unless we can prove you didn’t do it, Thaddeus! And not one of them will bother even trying. They’ve got their man, as far as they’re concerned – don’t you understand? Nought you can do from inside a cell. Hit me, boy! Quick, before someone comes!”
Behind them, there came the sound of raised voices – the rest of the division were preparing to head home. He looked Collins in the eye. The older man nodded.
“Come on, lad,” he said, softly. “You can do it.”
“I can’t,” Thaddeus said, biting his lip. “Collins, you’re just going to have to take me to the cells. I just can’t.”
The older man shook his head. He opened his mouth to speak again, but whatever he was about to say was interrupted. The door at the other end of the corridor – the one that led to fresh air and freedom – banged open, forced back on its hinges so violently that it struck the wall, sending a plume of paint and plaster into the air. Through it strode a tall, bald man who seemed to be spreading smoke in his wake. He wore no hat, and the pale skin of his head shone faintly in the sickly light of the hallway. His black wool tailcoat was covered with dust, which somehow lent him a ghostly air, and the heels of his dirty boots clicked sharply on the worn wooden floor.
“Stand aside, sir,” shouted the newcomer at Collins. “Unhand the boy!”
Collins raised his hands, but before he could say anything, the stranger had pulled something from inside his coat and took aim at the policeman. In shape it vaguely resembled a pistol, but there the similarity ended. It was like no gun Thaddeus had ever seen. It was the size of a loaf of bread, and silver, with a thin central column that attached a bulbous handle to a chamber of purple liquid at one end and a small dish-like muzzle at the other. This was the end that the man was pointing at the terrified Collins.
“Wait,” Thaddeus exclaimed as the man prepared to fire. “Wait,
don’t –”
Behind him, the door at the other end of the corridor opened as the rest of the detective division headed for home, led by a rosy-cheeked and triumphant Chief Inspector Glove.
“You, there!” the Chief Inspector shouted, stopping dead when he saw the scene unfolding in front of him. “What the devil are you doing?”
The stranger fired. His peculiar pistol shot a column of compressed purple air straight at Collins’ face. The policeman’s surprised eyes clouded over immediately and he slumped against the wall before sliding to the floor in a heap. The intruder then turned the weapon on Glove, who uttered an unceremonious yell and dived for the floor, the rest of the detectives following suit.
The stranger grabbed Thaddeus’ arm. “Come on,” he urged, pulling him towards the door.
Seven
The Truth in the Lie
“Get off me!” Thaddeus struggled, trying to free himself from the man’s grasp, which was surprisingly strong. “Who are you? Leave me alone!”
The intruder ignored Thaddeus’ protests and dragged him towards the exit as Glove and his men got back to their feet. Thaddeus was propelled through the door and stumbled down the wet steps outside, faltering on the cobbles as the stranger forced him onwards.
“Boy, if you don’t run now we’ll both be caught.”
“Then let us be caught! You shot Collins! He was trying to help me!”
“And so am I! It was only sleeping gas, for God’s sake! Come on, Thaddeus – run!”
Something in the man’s voice made Thaddeus look up, meeting the stranger’s eyes. They were shaded by the night and his ridiculously bushy eyebrows, but still Rec caught a distinctive flash of blue in their depths. He started.
“Professor?”
“Of course it’s me. Who did you expect, the Queen of Sheba? Now run, damn you!”
The Professor took off, out of Scotland Yard and into the flickering gaslight. Thaddeus kept close on his heels, hearing the shouts and sharp tin whistles of the police behind them. It seemed as if the whole of the Yard had joined the chase. The Professor ducked down one street that was swathed in darkness, and then turned a sharp right and ran straight down another.
“Professor,” Thaddeus managed to say, between heaving breaths. “Professor, you’re leading us straight towards High Holborn. There will be people everywhere!”
“Exactly,” the disguised professor called back over his shoulder, without a pause. “Safety in numbers, boy! Keep close, now!”
The street they were on suddenly opened out into a wider thoroughfare, which even at this early hour was busy with carriages. The Professor didn’t cross the road, as Thaddeus had expected, but instead charged towards a hansom cab parked at the corner of the British Museum. He opened the door, shouting something to the driver before looking back towards Thaddeus.
“Come on! Hurry!”
Thaddeus vaulted up the cab’s step and into its interior, crashing against the soft seat as his friend jumped in behind him. The Professor raised his fist and hammered once against the wooden panel beside Thaddeus. The cab took off at once, sliding smoothly into the channel of anonymous horse-drawn traffic streaming down the road.
“Ahh!” exclaimed the Professor, leaning back against the seat, out of breath. “That was a close one, eh?”
Thaddeus shook his head, also breathing hard. “You’re mad. Completely, totally mad! And what have you done to yourself?”
The Professor laughed, leaning forward and running a hand over the blank canvas of his shiny head. “Do you like it? I think it’s rather fetching, myself.”
Thaddeus reached out and hesitantly poked at the pale skin. It was slightly spongy to the touch. “That’s horrible! And those eyebrows! That nose! You look… awful!”
The Professor leaned back and sighed. “Ah well, never mind, I’ll remove it as soon as we get to the workshop. It did the trick though, didn’t it? Even you failed to recognise me. And if I hadn’t done what I did, you’d be languishing in a cell right now.”
Thaddeus looked out of the window, watching the night streets of London pass by, lit by the occasional tame halo of gaslight. He suddenly felt very, very tired. The motion of the cab rocked him from side to side as it rattled over the cobbles, moving east. He slipped into a doze, and didn’t wake until the driver pulled the horse to a standstill. Thaddeus blinked sleepily as the Professor leaned over and poked him with a bony finger.
“Come on, then, Thaddeus Rec,” he said. “Let’s get inside, eh?”
Thaddeus stumbled from the cab, realizing that they were at Limehouse Basin, which meant they were going to the Professor’s workshop. The dock was already busy, even though dawn had yet to colour the sky above the grimy wharves. Men shouted as they heaved goods onto the waiting boats that bobbed about in the oily, choppy water of the Thames. He nodded to a couple that he recognised as they skirted the edge of the Basin, faces he knew from his occasional drinks in The Grapes public house, just a few minutes’ walk away.
They slipped down one of the alleyways behind Oliver’s Wharf. The Professor glanced about him before pulling a heavy bunch of keys from his pocket and slotting one into the lock of an unimportant-looking door. He pushed it open and disappeared into darkness. Thaddeus waited until he heard the sound of a match struck, and the faint light of a candle lit his way. Then he followed the Professor, stepping inside and closing the door behind him.
“Excuse me for a few moments, won’t you?” called the Professor, disappearing into his private study at the other end of the room. “Just going to remove this face you so heartily disapprove of.”
Rec nodded absently as he shut
the study door. He had been here a hundred times and had spent hours tinkering with the objects gathered about him, but he still found himself taking an extra breath when he entered the workshop. For one thing, it was just so huge. It took up the whole lower floor of the Wharf, and at some point the Professor had knocked through all the walls save the supporting ones, leaving the space open. Into the resulting cavern was crammed every manner of wonderful, inexplicable mechanical gadgetry, creating a merry mess that overflowed the many workbenches and shelves and spilled onto the floor in piles of cogs, springs, levers and other bits and pieces.
One bench was dedicated to the workings of clocks, because the Professor was convinced that there was a way to make a pocket watch that would communicate with another watch of the same design, worn by a different person. He thought it would be possible to send messages from one to the other by means of a small electrical current, and so to experiment he had taken hundreds of them apart and wired them all up in different ways. Their collective ticking produced a whirring hum that filled Thaddeus’ ears like a swarm of bees as he passed.
Then there was the rocket pack. If Thaddeus was honest, this was the invention that he was most excited about. He kept trying to persuade the Professor to let him test it out, but the answer was always, “It’s not ready yet.” The idea was to create a steam-powered engine small enough for a man to carry on his back. The Professor was currently working on the idea that if he built a cylinder that produced a vacuum at one end and propulsion at the other, the force and motion could lift a grown man off the ground. It was a dangerous enterprise – the boiling steam alone could kill a man – but Thaddeus couldn’t wait to try it. Imagine being able to walk in the air – to fly like a bird. Of course, the Professor hadn’t quite worked out how to steer the thing yet, but Thaddeus had faith that it was only a matter of time.
The young detective dropped into a chair in front of the bench that seemed to hold the secrets of the Professor’s latest weapon – the gas pistol he had used so effectively back at Scotland Yard. Thaddeus had never seen it before. He set about trying to understand how it worked while he waited for his friend to return.
The Diamond Thief Page 6
