by George Mann
It would be an exaggeration to call the damp space I entered an alleyway. Though approaching three feet wide at the start, by the time I was five paces inside it had narrowed to less than two, and the sensation of claustrophobia I felt building in me was only exacerbated by the fetid water underfoot, the slippery mould that coated the walls and the increasing lack of light. The crooked tenements along both sides bent in toward one another like gossiping old women. I recoiled as something ran across my foot but did not let it distract me, for I could see that the tenements came to an abrupt stop only a few yards hence. I had travelled the length of the “alleyway” and, leaving it behind me, now stood directly in front of a squat, crumbling two-storey building of indeterminate use. This must be the place.
A sheet of rusted corrugated iron blocked the only entrance, but a firm push moved it and I ducked inside. There was some light within, cast by the full moon through an upper window, which illuminated a wooden staircase directly in front of me. Each step was bowed in the centre by the passage of decades of unfortunate inhabitants, and what railing had once existed was now reduced to a series of iron stumps, the remainder long since having made its way to one of London’s many scrap merchants.
It was plain that the building had not been built for habitation. A rusted sign at the foot of the stairs directed visitors to a reception area on the first floor and a rotten cork noticeboard on one wall still bore the label “Announcements”. But like so much of London, its abandonment had been only temporary. Close down a factory one day, and the poor in need of shelter will move in the next. Such is the way of this great metropolis.
Having come so far, I had no thought of turning back. I edged up the stairs, shoulder braced against the wall in the darkness, listening carefully for any sound from the upper floors. All was silent.
I reached the first floor and saw a long, wide, empty space without doors or windows. Incongruously, a candle shone in one corner of the echoing space, but its dim light shadowed rather than brightened the grey walls it reached. Layers of compacted filth littered the floor, with here and there a puddle of dark, still water reflecting the flicker of the candle. A set of railing-free stairs leading upwards, matching those I had just ascended from the ground, were the only other exit that I could see.
The stench was indescribable, and I pressed a hand to my nose as I stepped onto the next flight of stairs, kicking aside the desiccated corpse of a cat. The stairway doubled back on itself after a dozen steps, forming a small rectangular landing where the direction changed. Two women were slumped against the wall there, not sleeping but not completely awake either. Their eyes were open but red-lined and unseeing, and their mouths hung slackly down. Each woman held a battered tin cup in her hand – the source, no doubt, of their current incapacity. I considered the vile nature of their lives, and shuddered at the thought that only oblivion offered solace to such unfortunates, then squeezed past the nearest of the drabs and climbed the last few steps to the top floor.
The sight that greeted me was one such as I hope never to see again. The space before me was of similar dimensions to the lower floor, though slightly narrower, where a wooden partition had been built along one side, creating a series of small rooms. The air was fetid, warm and stale, as if I had stepped into an underground cavern rather than the hallway of a building in a modern city. The reason was obvious.
All along the walls silent people huddled together, every one as pale-skinned and grime-encrusted as the next. I tried to judge their number, but the moon hid behind a cloud and in the darkness I recognised that mere numbers were unimportant. That even one Englishman should live in such squalor was one too many. What I took to be a family had lit a small cooking fire, the smoke thus generated creating a “fog” that glowed in the light of the flame and billowed around my head, adding to the hellish aspect of the space. As I slowly walked forward, all the while casting an eye in the gloom for my quarry, hopeless faces peered out from beneath dirty shawls, and babies, miraculously able to sleep even in a place like this, stirred and moaned in their mothers’ arms.
I reached the back wall without a sign of Fred Hamilton and stood, irresolute and dispirited, unsure what to do next. The decision was taken from my hands, however, when one of the lost souls near me detached itself from the wall and stood in front of me.
“Whatcher starin’ at?” I snarled angrily, there being more to a disguise than mere face paint and rags. Failure to stand my ground would mark me as a potential victim, even if it did not unmask me as something rather more than I seemed to be. “Gerrout my way, damn yer!”
I made to shoulder past the shadowy figure, but a surprisingly strong hand grasped my shoulder and squeezed hard, stopping me in my tracks. “What’s yer rush, mate?” a man’s voice grunted roughly in my ear. “Got some place you’d rather be?”
I grasped the man’s wrist and pulled it from my shoulder, while simultaneously twisting round to confront him. The moon remained hidden amongst the clouds so that I could not make out his face, but he was of average height and well built considering the life of deprivation he presumably led. His voice suggested a man of middle age, but beyond that I could make out nothing more. Fortunately, the moon chose that moment to pass briefly into clear air and by its fleeting illumination I was able to examine my new friend.
“Watcher gawpin’ at?” he snarled, violence clearly uppermost in his mind. “Think yer better than me, do yer? D’yer even know who I am?”
He jabbed a thick finger into my chest, but I was expecting such a move and stood my ground. The thought occurred to me, however, that he might have a knife, for which I was wholly unprepared. As the moon slid once more into the clouds, I therefore decided to put my rough persona to one side and deal with the man as Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, instead.
“You are a former army sergeant,” I said automatically and without conscious thought, “who spent the bulk of his service years in this country, though you saw active duty in India in your final years. You left the army within the past three years, honourably and with a small pension, but you also had some savings of your own. This place is not somewhere you would be found in the normal way of things, but you remember the army fondly and still think of the men who were under your authority as being your responsibility.”
I paused for breath, balanced on the balls of my feet, ready for any attack that might come, but the man simply stood and stared at me for a long moment. My eyes had become accustomed to the gloom by now and I could make out a look of incredulity on his face. What to me seemed the most elementary of deductions obviously struck him as an altogether more impressive feat.
“How’d yer know all tha’?” he asked. “I’ll swear you’ve not been followin’ me.”
“No, I have not. I am looking for someone else entirely, in fact. Perhaps you can help me find him?”
“Tell me how yer knew all that first, then maybes I’ll see if I can help yer.”
He moved round to block my access to the stairwell and crossed his arms, evidently happy to remain there indefinitely if I did not explain myself. With little choice but to do so, I began to speak.
“It is simple enough, Sergeant. Your greatcoat, though now without insignia, is of a type used exclusively by the army up until roughly two years ago, when it was replaced with a lighter style. Your diction rules out your being an officer, but your bearing and the confidence in your voice suggest a position of authority, hence my suggestion of sergeant. Your skin has none of the weathering one would expect from an extended period spent in Her Majesty’s warmer dominions, but you have a distinctive limp caused by a bullet wound to the right knee, suggesting some time spent fighting abroad. I cannot be more precise than that without resorting to guesswork. It is possible, of course, that you were wounded in a clash with Irish rebels, for instance, but on the balance of probability a foreign posting seems more likely. Either way the wound led to your being invalidated out of the army, hence it occurred late in your service.”
His voice had softened and I sensed that any thoughts of violence towards me had abated.
“The greatcoat you wear for sentimental reasons, but the remainder of your dress is of reasonable quality, while your face, hands and nails are spotlessly clean. You therefore have a home somewhere beyond these walls, and, as an army pension famously is barely enough to live on, you must have some other income. Savings seemed most obvious. As for your feelings towards your men, that gentleman sitting in a gin stupor over there has the cap of the Northumberland Fusiliers on his head. You speak with a northern accent and you approached me from that direction. The deduction was a straightforward one.”
I hesitated, unclear whether this was sufficient information to placate my interrogator, but any trepidation I might have harboured of the man dissipated completely as he held out his hand.
“Peter Gilham,” he said as we shook, “Sergeant in Her Majesty’s Northumberland Fusiliers as was, wounded by a Xhosa spear in ’77 and chucked out on me ear soon after.” He sighed and looked round the filthy room. “Still, mustn’t grumble. There’s plenty as would bite off me hand for a billet cosy as mine.”
“You come here to keep one eye on a former comrade?” I asked quietly, already knowing the answer but keen to keep him talking.
“I do. Yer wouldn’t think it now, to look at him, but that lad there once held off twenty rebel natives for an hour, all on ’is own. Allowed the rest of us to push up and out, so ’e did. ’E paid the price though. Only just survived ’is wounds, and was pushed out ’isself right after.” He shook his head, the sadness in his eyes visible even in the half-light. “Look at ’im now, sir. Dyin’ with the drink, shaking fit to bust without it.”
“You come here often?” I asked. “You know the unfortunates who call this place home?” Hamilton’s absence had rendered my journey fruitless, but I wondered if Sergeant Gilham might yet be able to assist me in my search.
He nodded. “I do,” he replied. “They lead rough lives, them as live ’ere, and they’re at risk from all sorts. I’ll not ’ave one of my lads abused by no man, police or not, and the rest… well, since I’m ’ere anyway it’d be un-Christian not to look out for ’em too.”
“Police? Are they often seen?” There was a note of doubt in my voice, I knew, but it seemed unlikely that London’s overworked constabulary would have the time or the inclination to patrol such derelict buildings as this.
Gilham was adamant, however. “For a while they was, though I’ve not seen a sign of ’em for a year since. Tends to be folk with a bit less scruples as comes ’ere now. Rougher types even than these,” he concluded, gesturing to the lost souls about us.
There was nothing to interest me in the lives of such people, but Gilham’s mention of a police presence a year previously did pique my curiosity, for obvious reasons.
“These policemen – were they looking for someone in particular?” I asked, as casually as I could.
Men do not rise to the rank of sergeant if they are fools. Gilham examined me carefully for a moment or two before he spoke again. “Might have been,” he said finally. “It ain’t like folk come down ’ere looking for diamonds and emeralds. There ain’t no gold in Whitechapel, only copper and paper, and precious little of that too.” He laughed, but there remained a little of his earlier suspicion in his eyes. “But whatcha want to know for?”
Here I knew I must tread carefully. Gilham would say no more if he believed that I meant the boy any harm. “I am looking for a young man named Frederick Hamilton, a runaway, who has caused his family great grief,” I began. I would need to choose my words carefully, for I was sure that Gilham would know if I lied outright. “His parents are not yet ready to welcome him back into the family home, but they fear for his safety and would at least know that he was alive and well.”
“Thought you was a copper,” Gilham said thoughtfully. “All that figurin’ out about me. Only a copper’d be able to do that.” He paused, considering his options, then shook his head. “Can’t ’elp you, on account of never ’avin’ ’eard of the bloke.”
“No, no!” I hurriedly exclaimed. “I am not with the police, I assure you. I am merely a private citizen who is keen to give peace of mind to a dear friend and his wife.”
I wildly exaggerated my relationship with the Hamiltons, but other than that every word was true (to some extent, at least), and it was this core of near truth that caused the sergeant to believe me and let down his guard once more.
“Fair enough, yer not a policeman. Sorry to have said so. But there’s men ’ere who wouldn’t thank me for pointing the police in their direction. And maybes young Hamilton’s one of them.”
Gilham hesitated once more, then seemed to come to a decision and, beckoning me to follow, led the way down the stairs and out into the street.
To my dismay, it seemed that Holmes’s narrative ended there, for all that remained of the diary thereafter were the ragged edges of pages torn from its spine. Nothing daunted, I placed the book to one side and rifled again through the mass of loose papers that had accompanied it, soon uncovering several fresh pages that Holmes, for reasons of his own, had ripped from the diary. Unfortunately, there was no sign of the text that would have immediately followed the section I had just read. As a consequence, I was forced to resume the tale at a later point, with Holmes face to face with Frederick Hamilton and no direct indication of how he had got there or how much time had passed.
I held out a hand. “The letter, if you please, Mr Hamilton,” I said, for I had no intention of leaving it in his hands, once he had satisfied himself as to its nature.
He handed it back quickly enough, perhaps still recollecting the painful bruise I had been forced to inflict on his wrist not half an hour before. “Might I be told what you intend to do with it?” he asked, with something like the spirit with which he had initially greeted me. “Or is that too a secret to which I may not be privy?”
He spoke properly, as one might expect from a boy from his background, but I admit I found so well-spoken a voice emanating from so grubby a figure incongruous to say the least. And yet he had survived for two years on the hardest of London streets, amongst killers and worse, with nobody suspecting he was anything more than another unfortunate waif. Clearly, Fred Hamilton had the gift of appearing what he was not.
No matter how good his diction, however, the fact remained that he had stolen from his family, then absconded to take up a life of petty crime. The good Sergeant Gilham had left me in no doubt that Hamilton was not someone to be trusted, and I was not minded to tell him everything I knew until I was certain of his own role in the matter.
“Better that I should ask what you intended to do with it, after you lifted it from Dr Laidlaw’s pocket?”
His reply was instantaneous and insolent. “Who said I did?”
“Come now, do not play the fool, Mr Hamilton. We are agreed, are we not, that the letter you just returned to me is from a Dr Laidlaw of Curzon Street to a mathematics professor by the name of Moriarty. The letter accuses the professor of professional misconduct and plagiarism and threatens to unmask him to the university authorities if he does not at once resign his position. How else do you claim to have come into possession of such an item, other than by the pickpocketing that is your daily labour? Or do men of learning often entrust you with their most private correspondence?”
Hamilton shrugged, but knew he was beaten. “And if I did, what of it? A man needs to eat, Mr Holmes, and there’s nobody likely to put meat on my plate if I don’t do so myself.”
“Whether that is true or not, it is no answer to my question. What did you intend to do with the letter?”
The boy scowled, but I had the distinct sensation that whatever anger he felt, it was directed not at me, but at himself, for ending up in such a position. “I was hoping to extract a few quid from this Moriarty. Sho
w him the letter and point out that I could burn it as easily as show it round the university – and for a fiver, say, I’d be more than happy to buy some matches.”
Any respect I had for Hamilton almost evaporated then. It is one thing to be a criminal, after all, another entirely to be a stupid one. “And why would Moriarty pay you for a worthless letter?” I asked, with some irritation.
“So that I don’t let his employers know they’ve a cheat in their midst, of course!”
“And he would not have realised – as you obviously have not – that the letter is of little matter, for Dr Laidlaw could easily write another, and another after that, should the first go astray.”
“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.”
The look on Hamilton’s face was so forlorn that I almost felt sorry for him. I pride myself that I am an excellent judge of character, and I would hazard there’s no real malice in him, and perhaps even a yearning for good. Certainly, when I suggested returning the letter to Dr Laidlaw, he was not averse to the idea and agreed to accompany me. We would claim to have found the letter in the street and, recognising the return address on the envelope, thought it our duty to return it. A weak story, perhaps, but in truth, now that I had found Hamilton and confirmed that the letter really was nothing but academic sniping, I had begun to lose interest altogether.
Moriarty! The unexpected sight of that hated name caused my heart to beat more loudly in my chest. I quickly turned to the next page, but to my dismay Holmes’s story came to a halt once again, and on the reverse of this page were no more of my friend’s words, only an undated clipping from a newspaper, pasted into the centre of an otherwise blank space.
HORRIBLE MURDER OF UNIVERSITY DON
