April took the sack. ‘I’ll look after it,’ she said. ‘I know a few good hiding places.’
She smiled an enigmatic, slightly triumphant smile. Jack and Rupert glanced at each other and shrugged acceptance.
‘Shall I tell you how I got on with Mrs Barlow?’ asked April briskly, as if she were suddenly in charge.
‘Uh, yes, please,’ said Rupert. ‘Did you find out anything?’
‘There were a lot of people,’ said April. ‘The police moved them away in the end. There’s a crusher outside her door now. Someone important came in a carriage. When I looked through the house window, he was pushing her hand in some soot. Then he wiped it off again on a piece of paper.’
Rupert was perplexed. ‘Soot?’
April shrugged. ‘Looked like it to me.’
‘Oh,’ said Rupert. ‘I see.’ He turned his attention to Jack instead.
‘Any luck in Erskine’s room?’
Jack shook his head. ‘Not much. There wasn’t any rope or money. All I found was this.’
He produced the envelope and the strip of canvas.
Rupert looked from one to the other then took the envelope and shook its contents out on to his lap.
‘Well,’ he said, regarding the bills and receipts and scraps of paper, ‘if this is all we’ve got, we’d better have a look. Let’s do a pile each.’
He started dividing the heap. April stood up and turned away. Rupert looked up, surprised, then noticed Jack mouthing silently at him behind her back.
‘What?’ mouthed back Rupert.
‘She can’t read,’ said Jack without a sound.
‘Oh.’ Rupert hesitated. ‘Er, I’ll tell you what. Is anyone else hungry? I missed lunch.’
April always missed lunch. Rupert took a shilling from his pocket.
‘What if April finds a cake seller or pastry man and fetches us something back, while we do the boring stuff?’
April took the shilling without a word, picked up the grapnel sack and was gone.
The handsprings were good. Erskine was fascinated by the tumblers’ strength and agility as they somersaulted on to and off each other’s shoulders.
He felt a warm glow here in the market, where everything seemed bustle and good humour. Building sites lacked that. They made up for it in other ways, and those who worked on them were equally to be admired: they were the muscle and sinew of the nation. But markets, with their costermongers and street entertainers, their colour and vitality, were its beating heart.
Erskine settled down to sketch, eager not only to capture the scene in lines of charcoal, but also to be part of it. To belong. To this end, he threw aside his extravagant wide-brimmed hat and long swirling coat, and sat in his shirt sleeves like a common workman.
‘You’ll catch your death, Hugo,’ remarked the man who had just arrived to sit beside him, clearly with no intention of removing his own coat and hat.
Erskine turned, surprised.
‘Didn’t expect to see you here today,’ he said.
Colonel Radcliffe climbed swiftly into his carriage. He was vexed. The rank and file of E Division might regard an Assistant Commissioner with awe and jump to it when he gave an order, but he was not a law unto himself. He too had superiors. And when the Commissioner of Police himself summoned this new man from India to give an account of the case so far, he had no choice but to go. Everything else must wait.
Constables Adams and Downing had failed to find any threads of wire beneath the Nunwell Street back window and Radcliffe didn’t doubt they had searched with their fingertips as instructed. But that didn’t mean his theory was wrong. The scratches on the locking mechanism were real enough. There was so much still to do and here he was sitting in his carriage in a traffic jam. It could take an hour to get to Whitehall. Another hour back. Half a day wasted. He drummed his fingers in frustration.
April had been gone a long while. When she returned, without the grapnel, she handed three greasy pies and twopence change to Rupert. He put the money in his pocket and eagerly started munching. He wasn’t allowed greasy pies at home.
Jack didn’t comment on the change. Pies were a penny each, so seven pence had gone missing; probably, he suspected, in the form of lunch and dinner for April’s gran. Rupert hadn’t noticed and didn’t need to worry about the true cost of pies. Jack gave April a look, to let her know he was aware. And left it at that. She looked back at him defiantly as she ate.
Rupert nodded at the scattered bits of paper in front of them.
‘No luck,’ he told April gloomily. ‘No clues at all. Erskine’s certainly not poor. He sells a lot of paintings. And buys an awful lot of paint.’
The word reminded Jack of the scrap of canvas he’d taken from Erskine’s room. He delved under the bills and receipts and picked it up. Staring at it, he tried again to recall where the impulse to take it had come from. Then, quite suddenly, it began to come to him.
‘Did you say the man who visited Mrs Barlow pushed her hand in some soot?’ he asked excitedly.
April nodded, her mouth full.
‘And then wiped it off again?’
April spat out a piece of gristle. ‘Sort of.’ She mimed the action, splaying her fingers and pressing them on the flat roof.
‘What did he do with the paper?’
‘Don’t know. A crusher pulled me away from the window.’
Jack nodded and smiled. ‘Fingerprints,’ he announced. ‘It’s called fingerprints.’
He remembered now. It was one of the gems of information Mr Jevons had read aloud from a newspaper. ‘Mr Jevons joked about it: said you couldn’t be a sweep and a burglar because you’d always be getting caught.’
‘Why?’ asked April.
‘Because of our sooty fingerprints. Everything we touched would have our marks on it. Because everyone’s fingerprints are different. I’m sure that’s what it said in his newspaper.’
April grunted and finished her pie, dismissive of newspapers which she couldn’t read.
Jack quickly gathered the bits of paper back into their envelope and got to his feet.
‘Come on. Mr Jevons is at work but Mrs Jevons won’t mind us looking at the newspaper store.’
She didn’t mind. On seeing Jack, she was pleased and concerned in equal measure, and confused by his new friends, especially Rupert. She didn’t press too hard on exactly what Jack was looking for in the newspapers, but she did ask other awkward questions.
‘Shouldn’t you be at work, Jack? Hasn’t your father found you something yet?’
‘You’re not to worry about me, Mrs Jevons. I’ll be fine.’
And at that moment he felt fine: concerned for Mr Jevons, concerned for his father and responsible for solving the murder, but they were getting somewhere. He led the way through to the newspaper store, a mouldering pile of newsprint stacked in a shed in the backyard.
‘It wasn’t that long ago,’ said Jack. ‘Back in the spring, I think.’
He unloaded newspapers from the stack, and after several false starts, found the one he was looking for. He spread it on the ground and opened it.
‘There.’ He pointed at a headline, ‘News From The Empire’, and ran his fingers down the columns before pointing again and reading aloud, carefully and self-consciously.
‘Readers will be interested to learn of a most curious means of identification which, it is understood, has been successfully used in India for many years. Workers and prisoners who are unable to write their names, are required to make an impression with their thumbs as an alternative to a personal signature. It has been shown that no two persons have the same thumbprints. Thumbs are used for the purpose, being the largest of the human digits, but the same principle applies to all fingers. The minute ridges and rings on a person’s finger ends, when closely observed, are unique, and are not hered… heredit…’
‘Hereditary?’ offered Rupert. ‘Not passed down from parent to child.’
Jack nodded. ‘Hereditary.’
‘And I’ve read about it too!’ exclaimed Rupert.
April wasn’t surprised.
‘Well, not exactly – but the same idea. Pa’s got a book on the Ancients: the Mesopotamians and Babylonians and suchlike, you know?’
They didn’t.
‘Well, the potters who made the vases and bowls and things in those days put a finger mark on the clay while it was still soft. Obviously as a kind of signature.’
Obviously, thought April. She stared at her finger ends. They looked no different from anyone else’s. Jack went out of the shed and scooped a handful of damp soot from a bucket and spread it on a piece of wood, smoothing it to a thin paste.
‘April,’ he called. ‘Come and do what Mrs Barlow did.’
Warily, April allowed Jack to press her fingertips on to the soot, then plant them on the envelope he’d taken from the artist’s room. It was the only thing he had. April lifted her hand. The marks she left behind seemed nothing special. Jack repeated the process with his own fingertips.
‘Look closely,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ll see the difference.’
He wished they had Rupert’s magnifying glass. That would make it clear. April nodded but she wasn’t certain. Jack was, though. He held the scrap of painted canvas in front of April.
‘See these marks here? They’re fingerprints too, aren’t they? And they’re bound to be Erskine’s. If we found the same marks at Featherstone’s office, we’d know for certain that Erskine had been there.’
‘Featherstone’s office?’ echoed Rupert. ‘But it’s locked and guarded. We could get life imprisonment for burglary.’
He looked at April, who shrugged. There was a brief silence. Rupert swallowed.
‘When?’ he asked quietly. ‘Now?’
Jack shook his head. ‘It’s too light.’
‘I have to be home before five,’ said Rupert, slightly embarrassed, ‘or else Ma will keep me in for a week. I could sneak out tonight, though, after dark.’
Jack shook his head again. ‘We can’t manage in pitch black either.’
‘When, then?’ asked April.
Jack shrugged. ‘Tomorrow? Before dawn? I’ll meet you both in the road next to Nunwell Street. You can keep watch for me.’
‘All right,’ said Rupert after another pause. He picked up Erskine’s envelope of bills and receipts. ‘And, um, I’ll have another look at these, shall I?’
Jack nodded. ‘Don’t worry if you can’t be there tomorrow.’
‘I’ll be there,’ said Rupert.
They said goodbye and thank you to Mrs Jevons, and Rupert hurried away as the clock chimed five. Just for a moment, Jack wished fervently that he also had a mother who worried about where he was and what he was doing to go home to at the end of the day.
‘How have you managed to keep all this from your pa?’ asked April suddenly.
‘He’s never home,’ said Jack.
He put the scrap of canvas back inside his shirt. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Yes,’ said April.
As she turned away, Jack was struck by a thought. ‘Where did you hide the grapnel?’
‘In a sewer, of course.’
‘The Commissioner,’ announced Colonel Radcliffe, ‘asks me to convey to you all his satisfaction with your efforts so far, and his confidence that those efforts will bring this investigation to a speedy conclusion.’
The assembled ranks of E Division seemed pleased to have been praised by the Commissioner himself. Colonel Radcliffe did not confide in them the full extent of his conversation at Whitehall. Inwardly, he was seething because he had been made to feel foolish. The Commissioner had asked him, almost casually, the exact circumstances of the discovery of Featherstone’s body. How many police officers had been present? Had one stayed at the door while the other, or others, went into the office? For if one had not stayed at the door, and the murderer had still been inside the building, was it not possible that the murderer had merely slipped out while the officers’ backs were turned? Merely slipped out. It had been suggested with a shrug. But, of course, it was possible. It was basic. And Colonel Radcliffe, who prided himself on overlooking nothing, indeed had been appointed for that very reason, had overlooked it.
‘Constable Adams,’ he called before dismissing the rest of the men. ‘Please come to my office.’
Adams felt his blood drain into his boots. He trudged after the Assistant Commissioner while his colleagues stared at him before melting away.
In the office, Colonel Radcliffe turned straight to him.
‘I want you to tell me exactly, exactly what happened when you arrived at Featherstone’s office on the day his body was found. Who was with you – apart from the son?’
‘Constable Willis, sir.’
‘It was just the two of you?’
‘Yes, sir. Just me and Willis.’
The Colonel had begun pacing in a circle around him. It made Adams feel giddy.
‘Willis broke in, yes?’
‘He did, sir. Unlocked and unbolted the door. Let in myself and Richard Featherstone.’
‘Who went into the actual office first?’
‘Richard Featherstone, sir. We followed him in.’
‘Both of you.’
‘Both of us, sir. The father’s body was on the floor. The son was very upset, of course. So we pulled him away – we took an arm each and pulled him out of the office. Then we went back in to examine the body.’
‘Both of you?’
‘Both of us, sir.’
Colonel Radcliffe spoke with cool precision. ‘So there was a moment of time when neither you nor Willis was watching the street door?’
Oh dear, thought Adams. Oh dear, oh dear. This is what it’s about.
‘Is that correct, Adams?’
‘Yes, sir. That’s correct. Only for a few seconds. We didn’t think–’
‘No,’ said Colonel Radcliffe. ‘You didn’t.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘We all make mistakes, Adams. In the heat of the moment.’ Colonel Radcliffe found himself being magnanimous. He had no right to be otherwise. ‘It’s important that we acknowledge and learn from them.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Adams blinked. That appeared to be all. He hadn’t been sacked. Perhaps he should chance mentioning the prophetic sweep’s boy. But the Colonel’s stare was still harsh.
‘Anything else?’
Adams shook his head. ‘No, sir.’
One acknowledged mistake at a time was enough.
∗
Jack was also screwing up his courage. The window. He had to know about the window. He couldn’t put it off any longer. He’d taken the long route home, rehearsing what he would say to his father, the questions he would ask and how he would ask them. It was almost dark when he finally reached the street door and went in.
As he climbed the stairs, he could hear voices. They became raised and there was the noise of a chair scraped back and falling over. Jack thought it must be the neighbours arguing again. Then he recognized one of the voices as his father’s.
‘I’ve said nothing. Nothing.’
‘That’s not what I’ve heard. You talk too much. And there’s only one way to stop that.’
Another scrape of furniture followed the threat. Jack threw open the door and burst into the room. In the shadowy gloom he saw his father helpless on his back, sprawled across the table with another man’s hands tightly round his neck. Jack could hear the panicked gurgling gasps. His father was being choked to death.
Jack rushed at the assailant and tried to pull him off. The man reacted violently. Letting go of Tony, he lunged and grabbed at Jack instead.
Jack ducked the powerful hands and butted the man in the stomach. As the man staggered backwards, Jack clung on to him, head down, butting again and again at the hard muscular belly. Tony had scrambled away now and was standing, his back to the wall, gulping in air, watching as his assailant and Jack crashed into the table. For a moment it looked as
if Jack, now on top of the other man, would get the better of him, but then the table capsized under the sudden new weight. The noise as it toppled over, followed by the desperately struggling man and boy, provoked hammering on the wall from the people next door.
Tony danced around ineffectually but did nothing to help as the stronger man wrenched his arm free and, grabbing Jack by the hair, jerked his head back painfully. Jack yelled, tried to roll away, and man and boy, still locked together, thudded against the wall. The banging from the neighbours changed instantly to angry threats to call the police. The man paused for a second, listening to the shouts from the next room, then he shoved Jack hard in the chest, forcing him away. For the first time, Jack got a good look at his face.
It wasn’t Erskine. It wasn’t the scaffolder. It was no one he recognized. The man aimed one more blow at Jack then fled, leaving the door open behind him.
A peculiar silence followed. No neighbour came to complain or see what the trouble was. The only sound Jack could hear was his own rapid breathing and the thumping of his heart.
His father said nothing. Didn’t explain. Didn’t thank him. Merely closed the door and began slowly to right the furniture.
‘Who was he?’ Jack finally managed to ask.
His father shrugged. ‘No idea. A burglar, maybe.’ He attempted a joke. ‘Came to the wrong place here.’
‘Will you stop lying to me!’ Jack was trembling. ‘Just stop lying to me!’
Tony turned and regarded him. ‘Calm down, son,’ he said, venturing another slight smile.
But Jack couldn’t calm down. ‘You were paid to leave a window open, weren’t you?’
Tony frowned, deliberately blank. ‘Window? What window?’
‘Nunwell Street. Where you work. You left it open.’
‘Left it open?’
‘You left it open for the murderer!’ shouted Jack.
It was out. The boil was burst. In the silence that followed, he stood glaring at his father, willing him not to lie again. He was still shaking and his fists were clenched.
His father merely looked at him as if he were a two-year-old.
‘Don’t be stupid, boy. All the windows were locked.’
Jack’s arms dropped to his sides. He threw his head back and closed his eyes for a moment.
Scarper Jack and the Bloodstained Room Page 8
