Case of the Dixie Ghosts

by A. A. Glynn

  Dacers felt the man’s grip on his collar loosen and experienced his own jolt of surprise at hearing the man named. Bulloch was the name of the very active and elusive Southern agent in Liverpool in connection with whom he had visited the city as bodyguard to Theodore Van Trask during the American war.

  The man with the black moustache stared at Fortune as if in total disbelief, then found his voice: “Mr. Fortune, of all people!” he exclaimed. “Mr. Fortune!” Then he seemed to be enlightened and make a connection between Fortune and the Resurgent South about which he had asked Dacers shortly before. He framed the question again: “Fortune, are you—?”

  Fortune appeared to be rooted to the spot for a brief spell, but clearly anticipated how the question would finish. His squat frame quivered and he brought up the revolver as if to shoot Lieutenant Bulloch.

  Bulloch, seeming to be mesmerised by the discovery of Fortune, paid no attention to the levelled weapon. A year and a half before, he had faced the United States’ warship Kearsarge, bearing down on the raider Alabama with all guns blazing to send her to the bottom of the English Channel. Compared with that experience, facing one man with a mere pistol seemed as nothing. He continued walking towards Fortune with the older Bulloch following him and the weary Dacers bringing up the rear.

  Lieutenant Irvine Bulloch was bewildered and surprised at meeting Fortune, whom he knew as a guest in the officers’ mess aboard the Shenandoah. Equally surprised at finding him with a levelled gun in his hand, he was surprised most of all by the discovery that this supposed loyal Dixie patriot was somehow a party to a fraudulent criminal venture that cynically misused the defeated South and its stricken people in its web of lies.

  Aboard the Shenandoah, Fortune had told the officers little about himself except that he was an official of the Confederate government with a role that had to be kept highly secret. He had escaped from Richmond when the rebel capital fell, he was charged by President Jefferson Davis himself to go to England, carrying vital documents, and connect with friends of the South there who could help in alleviating the sufferings of the defeated people.

  Fleeing from the crushed South by devious ways, he had become stranded in the Azores.

  The Bullochs had broken their Liverpool cover and travelled to London as a matter of honour to get to the bottom of the obvious fraud that lay behind the letter they saw. They found the closed-up shop premises in its derelict setting the very appearance of which confirmed the bogus status of the self-styled Dixie Ghosts. Now, within reach of two of the scheme’s perpetrators, they seemed not to be intimidated by Fortune’s revolver, just as they had never been intimidated by powerful enemy naval guns on the high seas.

  “Get back!” snarled Fortune. “Get back, damn you, or I’ll shoot!”

  He continued backing away with Cal Tebbutt beside him doing the same. Fear was beginning to take hold of Tebbutt. His mental balance was precarious at the best of times and it was slipping in the face of the three determined men advancing on Fortune and himself. They seemed to embody retribution, revenge, and a settling of accounts. His instinct was to go for his Derringer, but it was concealed within his heavy winter clothing and a form of paralysis was preventing him from fumbling for it.

  Fortune’s courage was holding up no better. The gun was beginning to shake in his hand as the trio came closer to his companion and himself. He did not know who or what they represented. He knew who Irvine Bulloch was and he knew that Dacers, whom he had plotted to kill, was a private detective, but who was the older, bulkier man with them? Was he one of the dogged policemen from Scotland Yard?

  A worm of logic wriggled its way through the panicky confusion in Fortune’s mind, telling him that he dare not shoot. He had already fired one shot after Dacers in the alley and it seemed not to have alarmed this derelict region, which was being used as a storage area for the river improvement works. However, with the working day now starting, gangs of men would be working not far away. To open fire on the three men would be to attract immediate attention and bring a crowd of the curious and, quite probably, the police.

  The indecision and fear of Tebbutt and himself was obvious to the menacing trio and served to emboldened them. They continued to advance with firmer steps. Fortune’s gun hand began to shake more noticeably and he voiced a jittery and feeble warning: “Get back! Get back, damn you, or I’ll shoot!”

  He and Tebbutt continued to back away and the two Bullochs and Dacers followed them, step by step. Then, with lightning speed remarkable in one with a physical impairment, Fortune suddenly turned and ran off into the midst of the building materials, engines, and huts arrayed along the margin of the Thames. This caused Cal Tebbutt, alongside him, to shake off the grip of fear and he whirled around and joined Fortune in flight.

  The fleeing pair began to thread their way through the scattered confusion of the expansive storage site and the Bullochs charged after them. Septimus Dacers, wearied to the bone as he was, managed to find the energy and wakefulness to run after them. He desperately wanted to get his hands on Fortune, and was willing to risk a bullet if Fortune should turn and fire on his pursuers.

  Almost miraculously, the chase and the sheer desire to catch Fortune caused Dacers to find new energy, and he overtook the Bullochs, putting on a spurt of speed as Fortune and Tebbutt, somehow keeping together, swerved around a pile of timber. Ahead of them was a cleared space and the curtailed remains of one of the huge classical pillars of the old Hungerford Bridge designed by Brunel.

  Fortune and Tebbutt were level with the pillar when Tebbutt stumbled and fell, but Dacers continued running, gaining on Fortune, who was showing signs of wearying. Just as he reached the pillar, Dacers caught up with him, lunged forward in a dive and gripped him about the waist. They both smote the earth at the foot of the pillar. Fortune’s revolver flew out of his hand and skittered across the ground.

  Somewhere in the background, sounds of scuffling, grunts, and occasional yelps indicated that Tebbutt was being roughly handled by the Bullochs.

  Dacers and Fortune sprawled in the dirt with Dacers clutching the hunchback’s legs and Fortune trying to fight him off. They rolled around at the base of the remnant of the huge pillar, panting and snarling. Dacers found he was close to the fallen revolver. He flung out his arm and grabbed the weapon by its barrel then waved it, club like, over Fortune’s head.

  “Keep still or I’ll knock you cold!” he spluttered through a mouthful of dirt.

  Fortune, panting and growling, continued to struggle, and Dacers managed to shove him against the remains of the pillar where his energy gave out. He heaved a gusting sigh and lay still, fighting for breath.

  Dacers rose from sprawling to his knees and held the pistol threateningly over Fortune’s head. He now had the man totally at his mercy. “You’re keeping a big secret, Mr. Fortune, but not for much longer,” he stated triumphantly.

  The younger Bulloch left his brother sitting on the sprawling and defeated Tebbutt and joined Dacers to be greeted with a strange request. “Help me get his clothes off,” said Dacers, struggling with the buttons of Fortune’s heavy top coat.

  “What?”

  “Help me get his coat off—and his waistcoat and shirt,” repeated Dacers. Fortune was lying on his back and struggling feebly, but seeming almost exhausted while Dacers opened his coat buttons.

  “Go easy on him,” cautioned the naval man, “remember he has a disability.”

  “Disability be damned. Help me with this waistcoat,” rejoined Dacers. They removed the waistcoat, then set about Fortune’s shirt, which Dacers fairly tore off.

  Then Irvine Bulloch stared and gasped. For the true nature of Fortune’s “disability” was revealed.

  Secured by an arrangement of straps going over his shoulders and under his arms, the hump on his back was shown to be a cleverly shaped rigid mound made of leather which, under clothing, gave the exact impression of being a malformation of the spine.

  Fortune’s hump was as fraudulent as th
e get-rich-quick venture he promoted.

  CHAPTER NINE

  DEBACLE

  “By thunder!’ exclaimed Irvine Bulloch. ‘He’s not a hunchback at all!”

  “I guessed he wasn’t some time ago,” said Dacers, trying to supress a grin of satisfaction. “I heard a suggestion that the hump seemed to appear and disappear now and again. These two and their henchman jumped on me in the alley at Blindman’s Yard last night and caught me after a tussle. During the fight, I happened to grab Fortune’s hump and felt the whole thing shift under my hands and I knew it was not a natural part of his body.”

  Fortune, whose face was being held down on the ground, wriggled and grumbled and snarled as the pair examined the leather hump.

  It had an opening, a kind of door, securely fastened with a clasp, and the device was clearly a form of case or satchel.

  “Forget the shop at Blindman’s Reach. That’s only a place for mail delivery. This is the real office of the Dixie Ghosts,” declared Dacers. He opened the aperture, put his hand inside and produced several papers and some square, flat packages.

  “What are those?” asked Irvine Bulloch.

  “Correspondence which Fortune guarded jealously. These letters should reveal if these rascals made any money from their confidence trick. I suppose others are lists of the British donors to the war funds of the Confederacy, to be approached for more money.”

  “Yes,” said Irvine Bulloch said as if suddenly enlightened, “Fortune came into this country with us aboard the Shenandoah. He claimed to be a government official given a last secret mission by Jefferson Davis and was carrying special papers.”

  He pushed Fortune’s head, squeezing his face against the ground.

  “I suppose you did have some kind of government post in Richmond, Mr. Fortune,” he said, “and you managed to make away with useful papers when the Confederacy collapsed.”

  “Go to hell!” croaked Fortune with difficulty. “I’m telling you nothing!”

  Dacers opened one of the square packages and examined the contents.

  “As I thought, these packages contain the slides for the wonderful magic lantern contraption which they showed to their dupes. They’ll show the plans of what are supposed to be spectacular new weapons of war which need financing—and all are bogus. I suppose Fortune managed to have them made after leaving Richmond.”

  Irvine Bulloch blew out his cheeks. “I thought he was a genuine hunchback, but he carried this thing on his back day in and day out!”

  “Can you think of a better way of safeguarding your papers and other things, including items you need to perpetrate fraud, especially when you’re on the move most of the time, visiting the prospects you hope to dupe?” Dacers said.

  “Who are you, by the way? Police?” asked Irvine Bulloch.

  “Dacers, a private inquiry agent, not official police. And I know you’re Bulloch. I have reason to remember a Bulloch who was doing a particular service for the Confederate States in Liverpool during the American war.”

  “That was my brother, who is keeping the other gentleman company just behind us,” said the younger Bulloch. “And if you ever have any dealings with the United States’ Embassy, we’d take it as a great favour if you never mention knowing us or seeing us in London.”

  Dacers nodded. “Of course. A matter hanging over from your big war, I take it.”

  “Yes,” said Irvine Bulloch with a wry grin. “Hanging is exactly the word. Charges of piracy, but that’s as much as I’m saying.”

  “My lips are sealed,” Dacers assured him. “Speaking of the United States’ Embassy, I must have a word or two with Mr. Tebbutt, over there, whom your brother is using as a seat.” Fortune, whom the pair were holding down, began to make the most coherent remarks he could, considering his face was pressed hard against the earth. Mostly, they were lurid curses.

  “I suspect,” said Dacers “back in America, this hump came and went depending on which side of the Potomac River you happened to be, Mr. Fortune, the side held by the Union or the one held by the Confederacy.”

  “Who told you that?” spluttered Fortune with poison in his voice.

  “Oh, a most reliable party recalled that you were friendly with a certain Union officer when you were on the Washington side of the river—a Colonel Baker, I understand, and you were without a hump when with him. I’m willing to bet that when you crossed the river to the rebel side, you changed character and became a hunchback. I suppose some clever disguise, a crop of false whiskers perhaps, made you a different man from the one known across the river. Is it possible that what you learned on the Southern side went into your hump to be passed on to Colonel Baker, and what you learned on the Northern side went to the Southern intelligence men—for money in both cases, of course. Were you a double agent, Mr. Fortune?”

  “Damn you!” growled Fortune and, in spite of being held down by the two men, he suddenly became voluble. “And why not? I’m a Southerner but with no allegiance to either side. I didn’t care who was right or wrong in the war. I cared about me and what I could make out of it. I did work for the Confederate government for a short time, and I knew where records of the dealings with the British individuals and firms were kept. I made sure I got hold of them when the government fell and some offices were abandoned as the Yankee army took Richmond.”

  Dacers left the sinewy Irvine Bulloch firmly pressing the defeated Fortune to the ground, and approached James Bulloch, a man of weight and some girth, who was sitting on the subdued Cal Tebbutt.

  “Commander Bulloch, it’s an honour to meet you, sir.” he greeted. “I know something of your record in Liverpool and, as a neutral, I think I’m permitted to say your enterprise and skill in obtaining vessels for your country were admirable,” Dacers said.

  James Bulloch looked up from his unusual seat, gave Dacers a genial nod, and said in a rich Georgia accent: “Thank you, sir, but it was all in the line of duty for a simple sailor. What are we to do with this fellow, another renegade Southerner who would use the plight of his stricken people to fill his pockets?”

  “There are some things he and his companions, one of whom is missing, are answerable to British law for attempting to obtain money by false pretences or perhaps outright fraud if they’ve obtained any money,” Dacers said. “And there’s conspiracy to commit murder, a charge in which I’m personally interested. I also have a most particular interest in knowing what went on between him and a certain gentleman attached to the United States’ Embassy.”

  Cal Tebbutt looked up from under James Bulloch’s bulk. The blue powder burn on his face was vivid blue against skin white from fear. “You mean old Van Trask!” he spat. “Well, I can tell you he’s a traitor to his country! He gave money to the Confederate States—and I’m saying no more—except that he owes me money!”

  Dacers had not realised it, but other people were coming on to the scene. Half a dozen roughly clad working men from the renovation project had drifted into this location where the materials of their occupation were stored. They were led by a large, full-bearded man with clenched fists as big as hams. He had a firm step and an angry scowl.

  “’Ere, what’re you blokes doin’ ’ere?” he demanded loudly. “I’m foreman on this section an’ you’ve no right to be ’ere. What’s the game? Been some sort of a mill, ’as there? Two coves lyin’ on the ground and the rest of you lookin’ like you’re up to no good!” He looked at the brothers Bulloch, who had now left Fortune and Tebbutt sprawled on the ground. Throughout all the action, the Bullochs had managed to retain their tall hats, which, with their dark topcoats, still gave them an appearance of dignity. “An’ a couple of toffs among you!” shouted the foreman. “If you don’t ’ook it quick, I’ll get my blokes to set about you!”

  More workmen were drifting in and joining the initial group and a small crowd was gathering. The woebegone Tebbutt was now standing groggily, and Dacers dragged the half-clad Fortune to his feet and took a firm grip on the false hump with its conten
ts of evidence.

  He turned to the scowling foreman to attempt to give some sort of explanation when he noticed that the Bullochs had slipped away from the scene, using the crowd as cover.

  He knew the reason why. James Bulloch, because of his commissioning of commerce raiders in Liverpool during the Civil War and Irvine Bulloch, because he was an officer aboard the raider Alabama, were designated pirates by the United States’ government. They had a safe hiding place in Liverpool but, here in London, if they were to be captured and taken to the United States’ Embassy, they would be on American soil where warrants could be served. They would be deported for trial in America. This was a matter in which Dacers must keep his promise to Irvine Bulloch. From now on, he had not seen the Bulloch brothers.

  Just as he faced the angry, bearded face of the foreman, Dacers was startled by a well-known voice bellowing behind him: “Dacers! What’s the row here?”

  He jerked his head round to see Detective Inspector Amos Twells, accompanied by two large men in civilian clothes, very obviously detectives, bearing down on him.

  Amos Twells stumped towards him, looking with intense interest at Dacers’ dishevelled appearance. His hat was gone, his dark topcoat was soiled with dust and dirt, and his cravat was awry. “I knew you were up to something when I saw you last night,” hooted Twells. “I see by your condition that you were hardly taking a constitutional. What’s been going on?”

  “A little tidying up of the landscape, Amos—improving things rather in the spirit of Mr. Bazalgette,” Dacers informed him brightly. Weariness from lack of sleep and his recent strenuous exertions had soaked into his very bones but he kept up a cocky front.

  “Don’t try to be humorous. And who were the two men who were with you a few minutes ago and who’ve now gone so quickly?”