The Harvest Man

by Alex Grecian

  “And you thought this was a clue?” He held up the dirty piece of jewelry and frowned at it.

  “We hoped. Or rather it crossed our minds that it might be.”

  “Oh, I do wish I could’ve helped you,” Goodpenny said. He handed the silver cuff link over to Hammersmith, who slipped it back into his pocket.

  “Well,” Hammersmith said, “we appreciate the attempt anyway. Good to have met you, sir.” He turned away, but Fiona didn’t follow him.

  “I wonder . . .” she said. “You mentioned that you travel to Cornwall for your silver things, didn’t you?”

  Hammersmith perked up and grinned at her. If he hadn’t been so tired, he might have thought to pursue the thread himself. But it was her idea, so he stayed silent, letting Fiona take the lead with the old man.

  “Oh, no, my dear. I go to Cornwall. Twice a year.”

  “Of course. Now I remember, you did say Cornwall. And you think this cuff link comes from there as well?”

  “I showed you myself,” Goodpenny said. “It’s a perfect match, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. But do you think there are other merchants who go there, too? I mean, might there be someone else selling the same sorts of things from the same place?”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” Goodpenny said. “Yes, indeed. I, for one, always travel with my good friend Mr Parks, and I’m sure he finds splendid pieces of his own to bring back. Of course, sometimes our purchases overlap each other’s, but a little healthy competition is good for the economy, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Quite,” Fiona said. “Are there others, besides Mr Parks, I mean? Others who also deal with the family you deal with? The silversmiths in Cornwall?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know. Probably a few, but not too many. And they’d be spread about, you know. Not all clumped together here in the city. Good Lord, we’d be stepping all over each other to sell a cuff link. You’d be able to buy one for practically nothing and we’d all be in the poorhouse.”

  “And your friend? He’s a jeweler?”

  “No, he’s a hatter, my dear, but he carries a small assortment of accessories.”

  “Could we . . . Would you mind terribly giving us his address?”

  “Do you think he might be able to tell you something about this clue?”

  “I doubt it very much, but it’s worth a try.”

  “Indeed. Give me a moment and I’ll write down his particulars.” Goodpenny disappeared behind his curtain. He emerged in no time at all holding a small cream-colored card with a familiar bit of filigree in one corner. In a small precise hand he had written the address of his friend on Jermyn Street. He hesitated, looking back and forth between them, unsure about who should be given the card, but Fiona reached across the counter and took it from him.

  “Thank you very much, Mr Goodpenny.”

  “I do hope this helps in some way. Mr Parks is a good man, though. I’m sure he’ll do his utmost to be of assistance.”

  Hammersmith tugged at his forelock and nodded at the shopkeeper.

  “You’ll let me know if you catch the murderer, won’t you?”

  “Of course we will, sir,” Hammersmith said.

  “My prayers are with you, Mr Angerschmid. And good day to you, Miss Tinsley. Might I say, you’re a most charming couple.”

  “Oh, but we’re not,” Hammersmith said. “Not in the least bit.”

  “My mistake,” Goodpenny said. “Terribly sorry.”

  Hammersmith turned to Fiona, but she was already gone. He spotted her several yards away in the crowd, already at the stairs, her blond head bobbing down and out of sight. He hurried to catch up with her.

  Halfway down the stairs, he had to stop. He was out of breath and he put his hand to his chest. He could feel the furrows and bumps of his still-healing wound through his shirt. He wondered if breathing too hard might strain his injured lung, cause it to burst open, filling his chest cavity with air and blood. Was that even possible? He saw himself collapsing and tumbling down the steps. He kept his head down and waited for the pain to let up. Somebody bumped into him hard, rocking him back against the railing. The man leaned in and whispered something low and unintelligible in Hammersmith’s ear. Hammersmith snapped his head up and around, but the man was already walking away from him up the stairs, disappearing among the bustling throngs. Hammersmith shook his head and clutched the railing tight and descended to the ground floor.

  By the time he managed to elbow his way through the shoppers downstairs and out into the sunlight, Fiona was halfway down the street. The pain in Hammersmith’s chest had subsided and he half ran, half walked after her. When she heard him coming up behind her, she stopped and turned.

  “Good thinking, you,” he said when he had caught his breath again. “Getting that other name from him, I mean. You’d make a fine detective.”

  “Well, that makes one of us,” Fiona said. “You couldn’t detect a soup stain if it was right under your nose.”

  He looked down, surprised to see that he did, indeed, have a soup stain on his right sleeve. When he looked up, Fiona had gone again, stomping down the street with the little card in her hand and a slight breeze blowing her hair back over her shoulders. Hammersmith shook his head and let her get ahead of him. She acted like she was angry with him, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why.

  Puzzled, he drifted along in her wake.

  30

  The boys, Robert and Simon, had still been asleep on the daybed and Claire had cautioned him about waking them—“After what they’ve been through, sleep is a blessing”—so Day had returned to Scotland Yard, leaving Henry and his bird, Oliver, behind to help and amuse the new household staff. The corner of the main room that was reserved for use by the Murder Squad was empty, everyone else off their desks and out in the city, presumably investigating things. Everything had been removed from the walls and set aside, waiting for the movers to take it all away to the new Norman Shaw building. There was a sense about the place of an ending, of people moving away and leaving it empty, devoid of all but dust and shadows, a party hall after everyone had gone home to bed.

  Inspector Wiggins had taken full advantage of Day’s new drudgery duties. He had left a stack of witness statements an inch thick on Day’s desk, all to be sorted and abridged. And there were other odds and ends of reportage and paperwork left behind by some of the other police for Day to organize. He sat and stared at it all for a few minutes, then got up and limped to the back wall, beneath the coat hooks, where boxes of old case reports were kept on shelves, three high and twenty across. The bottom queue of cartons, which represented the oldest cases, had already been moved over to the new location. Only the most recent files were left, as they might still be needed again soon. He hoisted the topmost box of archives from the end of the shelf and took it back to his desk, opened it, and began to shuffle through the reports inside, not entirely sure what he was looking for, just aware that something was tickling the back of his brain.

  He had barely begun sifting through the stacks of paperwork in the box when the door of the commissioner’s office opened and Sir Edward Bradford stepped out. He was holding a box of his own, a large garment box, tucked under his arm. He was a thin man with a full white beard and friendly intelligent eyes under a high brow. He had lost his left arm, all the way to the shoulder, to a tiger in India and subsequently kept that sleeve neatly pinned up out of the way. He walked to Day’s desk and Day took the box from him, cleared some papers out of the way, and set it down. He lifted the lid and shook his head at Sir Edward.

  “It’s a constable’s uniform.” His eyes went wide. “Oh, no, you aren’t—”

  “Don’t worry, Walter. I’m not making you walk a beat. Take it out and give it a look.”

  Relieved, Day lifted the jacket out, leaving the corresponding dark blue trousers in the bottom of the box, and unfolded i
t, held it up so the light from the window hit it. Two buttons were missing from the front and another from the left sleeve, a bit of thread left behind where the smaller button had been torn off. The cuff of the left sleeve was frayed and threadbare, a long irregular stain drizzled down the side from under the collar on the right-hand side, there was a rip in the lining in back, the seam had burst along the right shoulder, and there was a hole beneath the armpit.

  Day smiled at Sir Edward. “This was Hammersmith’s?”

  “Yes,” Sir Edward said. “He returned it two days ago. I almost let him keep it. It’s not good for anything but rags now. Except the hat. That we can use again. I can’t very well pass the rest of this on to another policeman.”

  “Yet you took it from him.”

  “Well, perhaps we’ll start a Sergeant Hammersmith museum one day. This will be the centerpiece.”

  “I’m afraid to even look at the trousers,” Day said.

  “Don’t. They’ve fared even worse than the jacket, if you can believe it.”

  “He’d come back, if you’d have him. You could just give the whole shabby thing back to him. He’d come today if you sent for him.”

  “I know,” Sir Edward said. The glint of amusement faded from his eyes. “He’d come back to work today, and tomorrow, given his reckless abandon, he might very well be dead. If not tomorrow, next week. I didn’t sack him because I wanted to. I did it to protect him.”

  “Sir, he’d rather die doing his duty than live by any other means. He’s a born policeman.”

  Sir Edward held his hand up and waved it, dismissing the subject. “I thought you’d be charmed by the state of his uniform, that’s all. I’m not ready to take up this discussion again. Let’s at least allow the poor boy to heal from his wounds. It’s a miracle he’s alive at all.”

  Day put his head down to conceal his excitement. The commissioner hadn’t ruled out bringing Nevil Hammersmith back to the Murder Squad. He was still considering it as a possibility, at least, and Day knew better than to push him on it. He refolded the jacket, not taking any particular care with it. A few more wrinkles and creases weren’t going to harm it. He laid the jacket back in its box and closed the lid, but Sir Edward didn’t pick it up.

  “You’ve heard about Inspector March.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, sir,” Day said.

  “Swallowed his own tongue.”

  “Or had it fed to him.”

  Sir Edward shook his head. “Inspector . . .” He stopped and sighed and shook his head again. “You know, it’s not that I don’t believe you.”

  “About Jack, you mean? Jack the Ripper, still at large, still a danger to everyone in London? Hell, a danger to everyone in the country.”

  “About that, yes. I believe that you believe that. And I’m not in a position to prove you wrong. But we’ve searched those tunnels, scoured them, for days, looking for any sign of the person you claim you saw there. We found nothing. We even had Dr Kingsley down there with his finger-ridge powder, whatever he calls it, and you know what he found.”

  “He found the marks of Inspector March’s fingers.”

  “Everywhere. He found that Adrian March had been all over that dungeon where you were held, had handled the implements of torture we discovered there, had touched nearly every surface that was there to be touched.”

  “Which doesn’t rule out the presence of someone else there, sir, all due respect.”

  “No. No it doesn’t. But it doesn’t help us find that person, either. You yourself admit that you never saw this fiend who hurt you so badly.”

  “He stayed in the shadows, but I heard his voice. So did Sergeant Hammer . . . Nevil heard it, too.”

  “Yes. You heard a voice. And you were both in a great deal of pain. You’d lost a lot of blood. And Nevil had a scissors in his lung. He was practically unconscious.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact . . .”

  “You must see that the logical conclusion is that Inspector March was your tormentor. Whether he was Jack the Ripper or not . . . That’s not for us to know.”

  “Did he ever tell you he was the Ripper?”

  “He never told me much of anything, Walter. Nothing useful. And now he’s gone, and he’ll never have the chance. You know how much I respected him.”

  “I know.”

  “And I know that you respected him, too. It hurts me that he changed so much. It hurts me that he did these things to you, damaged you in your body and in your mind. And it’s on me now to give you what you need to recover. You and Nevil, both. You think I’m punishing you with all this . . .” He pointed at the file box full of papers. “But I’m not. And I’m not punishing Nevil by sending him away. I hope you’ll see that someday.”

  Day nodded, but didn’t look up from the top of his desk.

  “Anyway, we’ve discussed all this. I just wanted to make sure you knew about March. One day perhaps we’ll both forgive that man for what he did. As it stands, it doesn’t look like he was able to forgive himself.”

  Sir Edward picked up the heavy garment box. Day was impressed by the strength in the commissioner’s fingers, to be able to hold the box closed and grip it so tightly. Sir Edward tucked it back under his arm and hesitated.

  “And,” he said, “I thought you might get a chuckle out of seeing the state of Nevil’s kit. Lord knows we can all use a laugh round here.” He turned and walked back to his office, but paused with his hand on the knob. “I’m going to miss this place,” he said. He didn’t look at Day; his gaze wandered around the empty room, at the scuffed floor, the old gas fixtures, the grimy windowpanes, and the faded green paint on the walls. “It has character. I’m not likely to live long enough to see our new headquarters become so well used.” He shook his head and stepped into his office and closed the door.

  Day stared at his box of archived files for a long minute, then went back to unpacking it, stacking the paperwork on his desk. The desk where he belonged.

  31

  Fiona sat across from him, but she stared resolutely out toward the front of the bus and refused to look at him. He had decided to give her time. Eventually she would either get over whatever was bothering her or she would tell him about it and he’d have a chance to smooth it over. Meanwhile, in the absence of any better clues, they jounced along in an omnibus headed for St James and Jermyn Street. Hammersmith turned his gaze from Fiona to the woman next to her, who cooed at a baby in her lap, her free arm wrapped around a little girl who was busy pretending she didn’t see Hammersmith. He grinned at her and looked away when he saw her trying not to smile back at him. On the other side of Fiona was an older gentleman, oblivious to everyone else, his nose in a newspaper.

  Hammersmith closed his eyes and spread his legs wide, folded his arms over his chest, steadying himself as the bus swayed gently from side to side. He could hear the clop-clop of the horses’ hooves and the clamor of other vehicles. He wished he’d thought to bring a book along. He had begun Jerome Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) and had just come to the bit in chapter three where Uncle Podger made a mess of things while trying to hang a picture frame. Hammersmith imagined the character as his own uncle, whose name was Bamford, not Podger, and who wasn’t anything like as clumsy as the uncle in the book, but who brought a form of benign chaos with him everywhere he went.

  Hammersmith fell asleep while thinking fondly about Uncle Bamford’s cluttered cottage, where he had spent many long summer afternoons. But he sank immediately into a murky nightmare scenario in which the cottage housed a street fair populated by enormous exotic creatures that bustled to and fro without looking where they were going. Hammersmith was lost in the midst of the steady flowing traffic of these blurry pink beings. He looked down and was not surprised to see he was wearing his old uniform, but it was much too big for him. His hat fell down over his eyes and he pushed it up, t
urning in small circles, trying to find a way out through the strange shoppers in front of him no matter which direction he faced. At last he spotted a rabbit hopping away from him, dodging the creatures’ feet, its white tail bobbing up and down, swaying back and forth in a way that made him feel as if the floor he was standing on was moving. The tail was a beacon and he followed it, darting between giant legs, holding his hat up so he could see. The hems of his trousers tripped him and he used his free hand to hitch them up, bunching the extra fabric at his waist in his tiny fist. He seemed to be gaining on the rabbit, who grew larger as he drew closer to it. He now saw that it was much bigger than he was; its tail was the size of a two-wheeler and it was shiny, glowing. Then it disappeared and Hammersmith drew up short at the mouth of an enormous hole. He peered down into the dark, which he now realized was a mine shaft, and saw a glimpse of that giant rabbit’s tail before it was swallowed by the inky blackness at his feet, like a flare snuffing out. He heard people moving out of the rabbit’s way: people he somehow knew were miners working a vein of silver under the street.

  Panicked, not sure whether he was meant to follow the rabbit down beneath the earth, Hammersmith looked all round him and saw that he was utterly alone. The strange creatures were gone and the sun was sinking on the horizon. All the booths and kiosks were shuttered. Bits of discarded newspaper blew along the empty avenue. One stuck to his chest and he grabbed it, held it up in the last rays of the setting sun, and read the headline: INCOMPETENT POLICEMAN GETS OWN FLATMATE KILLED! PRINGLE REVEALS MURDER PLOT! He threw it away and immediately felt another windblown page hit him, this one much heavier. He plucked it from his chest, but it was now too dark to read it and it was covered in blood anyway, and he dropped it. The blood was his own, seeping through the front of his chest, soaking his shirt, thick and clinging and sticky.

  He wasn’t alone anymore. There was someone else nearby. A man-shaped hole in the darkness moved steadily toward him and then it was there, he was there, and he leaned in close to little Hammersmith, brushed his dead black lips against Hammersmith’s ear, and whispered a single word, then pressed something into Hammersmith’s hands, something cold and metal. And then the man shape was gone. Alone once more, Hammersmith hefted the metal thing in his hands and knew that it was a pair of scissors.