The Firebird's Feather

by Marjorie Eccles

  During the night the weather broke. Thunder crashed over the city, waking up its sleeping inhabitants. Lightning flashed, changing London’s river to a silver serpent, illuminating the streets and the buildings, the Tower, Big Ben and St Paul’s … The rain crashed down and flattened the bedding plants set out in the parks and public gardens for the coronation; it ruined the bunting, but Kitty heard nothing of it; she was deep, deep in a dream …

  A dark forest and a unicorn with silver hooves leading her through it. A golden feather that twists and trembles in her hand, and a huge grey wolf with yellow eyes and slavering jaws who tries to take it from her but then slinks away, his tail between his legs. A great golden bird in a tree who asks her what she wishes for, and when she cannot answer, there is Mama, saying, ‘Be careful, little Katyusha. Wishes are liars …’

  ‘Miss Kitty,’ Emma says as she wakes in a panic, ‘Miss Kitty, here’s your tea.’

  Eight

  Joseph Inskip was resigned to having his Sundays disturbed in the line of duty, but as an unmarried man, free of the demands of wife and children, this didn’t usually trouble him too much, unless it happened to be a day such as yesterday had been – a scorcher, and too hot to expect anyone to work. But there was nothing he could have done about that – the incident he’d been called out to attend, the shooting in Hyde Park, had had all the makings of Trouble with a capital T.

  After the night’s storm, the weather showed no signs of cooling off today. If anything it was hotter than ever. Arriving at New Scotland Yard, he took off his jacket, draped it carefully over the back of his chair. None of his colleagues had yet come in, and after considering for a moment, he took his waistcoat off as well. Only then did he pick up and read the note on his desk, from Gaines: a meeting, nine thirty, in his office.

  Until recently the two men had been operating from different departments, then Inskip had been transferred from Leman Street in Whitehall to the Yard, and found himself partnered with Gaines, or rather, working as his subordinate. Pooling experiences and co-operating in the interests of solving a complicated case was a concept which should in theory work to the benefit of all concerned, and mostly did, but there was always the possible clash of personalities to take into consideration. That hadn’t happened yet as far as he and Gaines were concerned, though Inskip thought it still might. They were still wary of each other. On the surface Gaines was easy enough, even if Inskip thought him too cautious. He was apparently well thought of by the top brass, whereas Inskip knew only too well that he himself was marked down as one of the awkward squad. Not that it troubled him in the least because he also knew that although they might get twitchy at his refusal to toe the line always, it had so far propelled him to where he now was.

  The sergeants’ office remained empty and he continued to sit in his shirtsleeves and fancy braces, twisting the heavy, gold signet ring on his little finger as he thought over the details of the Challoner case, few as they were as yet.

  Her family had chosen to believe it was an accident, which was understandable. Lydia Challoner had been an ordinary, law-abiding woman with nothing in her life to suggest that anyone would have reason to shoot and kill her. But the police knew just how unlikely her death was to have been accidental. For one thing, she hadn’t really been what one might call an ‘ordinary’ woman. She was the wife of a well-to-do stockbroker, living in a large, expensive London house with servants and a luxurious lifestyle, and with an extensive social diary, a woman who gave generously of time and money to various charitable organisations. And unlike most other women, she had a profession: she was a successful novelist. Definitely not ordinary.

  She was also of Russian descent, Inskip reminded himself. But that, he put on one side for now.

  He picked up a pencil and rolled it between his palms. At the moment, there were too many so-called ordinary women around who were not law-abiding. Nice women who’d turned themselves into screaming harridans. Suffragettes, causing damage to property and untold trouble to the police – not to mention the public – disrupting life in general with their uncouth behaviour and outrageous demands. Plenty people out there who had been at the receiving end and some of them wouldn’t jib at retaliation if they should happen to discover who the perpetrators were – though not, as yet, to the extent of taking a gun and shooting them.

  There were a lot of women of Mrs Challoner’s class lately, women of leisure with time on their hands, who led lives secret from husbands who’d have been willing to take a horse-whip to them if they knew what they were up to. Inskip would’ve felt the same way, if he’d had a wife at all, but he had not, a situation he’d no intention of altering in the foreseeable future, either. Had Lydia Challoner, despite what everyone believed, secretly been one of those militant suffragettes? Had she committed some terrible crime in the name of Votes for Women, against someone who had decided to take his own revenge? They’d grown ruthless, these women, and cunning, adept at evading the police and escaping detection. Her husband had given a definite no to the suggestion; he had sworn she’d never been active in the movement, or even remotely connected in any way with it.

  They had had to let Challoner go, of course. Bringing him down here to the Yard hadn’t been much more than a routine gesture, following the rule book; they could have continued to question him at his own home, but that had been the way Gaines wanted to play it. Inskip had a strong feeling the DCI might have had more instructions about this from on high than he was saying.

  But Louis Challoner was by no means yet in the clear. If he had so wished, he’d had plenty of time last Sunday between leaving his club in St James’s and arriving home in Egremont Gardens to have made a detour into Hyde Park. There was only his word for it that his hired taxi-cab had taken so long. His gun was unaccountably missing, and a search for it would be pointless; it could be anywhere, tossed into the Serpentine or even the Thames after using it. More importantly, such a gun as he owned wasn’t capable of firing the distance from where the shooter had been spotted (by several other witnesses, as well as by Marcus Villiers). All the same, his reaction when he opened the safe had been unsatisfactory enough to give rise to some suspicion that all was not as it seemed.

  Inskip glanced at the big round clock on the wall, donned his waistcoat and jacket and went to see Gaines.

  The inspector’s office was already building up steam and Gaines, himself in shirt-sleeves, glanced at Inskip but made no comment. He’d ceased to question why the sergeant insisted on dressing in full toff rig-out, even in sweltering temperatures like today’s, or why it went harder for him than most of the others when he had to go undercover disguised as a docker or a navvy. He waved him to a seat and passed a paper across the desk. It was a report by the police surgeon saying that the bullet extracted from Lydia Challoner’s body had come from a Mauser C96 pistol, known as the ‘broomhandle’ because of its long barrel, unhandy in some ways but popular because of its distance capabilities. Much more so than the pocket pistol (also incidentally a Mauser) allegedly missing from Challoner’s safe.

  It was after all no more than had been expected. From the first it had been evident that a long-range gun must have been used, capable of firing accurately from where it was assumed the marksman had been waiting. Because of this, Special Branch were taking an interest in the case – special in the sense that it had been created specifically to monitor the activities of foreign troublemakers. They had a wealth of experience in dealing with incidents involving firearms and special responsibilities for those calling themselves anarchists – and other like-minded troublemakers. The identification of the weapon and its implications were sinister: guns of any kind, in particular sophisticated Mausers, rather than the usual knives, were currently the weapons of choice for members of any one of the foreign revolutionary gangs who had been terrorising the community and causing the police so many big headaches over the last few months.

  The East End of London was where it all happened. Violence roamed the streets of W
hitechapel, Spitalfields, Stepney and surrounding districts untamed at present. Inskip had grown up around those parts. He had come over from Ireland as a child with his parents, who had sought a better life in England. It hadn’t materialised for them. His mother had died, worn out by endless child-bearing, his father a few years later of consumption, a legacy from his famine-wrought childhood. Inskip and three of his brothers had survived, and they had all taken ship to America to join an uncle already settled there. Inskip had joined the Boston police, but he missed London and after a few years he’d returned and joined the Metropolitan Police as a constable. His knowledge of the East End where he’d grown up was one of the things which had helped in his transfer to the detective branch – he knew every hole and corner, every vice contained within it. Thieving and murder, men and women stabbed in drunken fights between wife or husband, some shopkeeper or other robbed and left for dead, a prostitute found strangled in an alley, homeless vagrants done to death for their broken boots and other rags – just some of the more mentionable occurrences the police had always had to deal with. The deprivation and hopelessness of the inhabitants had always seen to that. But now, over and above the violence which had never been far away, violence of another order had crept in.

  The different ideologies, the confused and chaotic politics of the many ethnic groups who now made up most of the seething population had worsened the situation. Terrorists from Eastern Europe: rabid Bolsheviks and the more moderate Mensheviks, communists, anarchists, communist-anarchists, nihilists; Poles, Russian Bessarabians and Odessans mingled with the earlier huge influx of Jews who had fled from political and religious persecution and settled here. Some of them were idealists, working for when they could return to their own country; some had found asylum here, a better life, and wanted to stay; others were thugs, hardened by brutality and privation. Fighting between the various gangs was so common it wasn’t worth remarking on, and infighting within the gangs wasn’t unknown. Fists, knives and broken bottles, pitched battles were the order of the day – and now guns had entered the scene. Many of the newer arrivals were Letts – Latvians who had fled Russia after their bloody but unsuccessful revolution in 1905, which had made them enemies of the state, wanted by the hated and feared Ochrana, the Secret Police. These terrorists existed in lawless bands dedicated to obtaining funds by any means, criminal or otherwise, to smuggle back to their comrades in Russia in order they might carry on the fight. They were hard, dangerous men, and if they were apprehended, they didn’t hesitate to shoot and kill, as the police recently had good reason to know.

  But what had any of them to do with a woman of no importance to them or their schemes?

  Gaines must have been reading his mind. ‘Let’s not lose sight of the fact there may be more to Mrs Challoner than appears. Why should she take that gun, for instance? Assuming she did. For someone who had such an avowed distaste for them, it doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Unless she’d decided her husband was right, after all, and she did need protection.’

  Gaines gave a grunt. ‘All the same, it wouldn’t be a good idea to ignore any possible connections, unlikely as they might seem at the moment, with our friends from the East.’ He paused. ‘Such as her being of Russian descent.’

  ‘She’s lived here all her life. And wasn’t much more than a baby when she came here with her father.’

  ‘And possibly growing up steeped in his views. Don’t forget, he was an exile after he fell foul of the authorities in Russia, and he carried on his support work from here until he died. And – he was a friend and disciple of Kropotkin. Possibly helped with the smuggling of arms to Russia, and certainly with subversive literature.’

  Inskip shouldn’t have been surprised at how much information the DCI had managed to gather in such a short time. George Gaines seemed to have a well of subterranean information he could draw on at will. An educated man, one of the new breed of policemen, he had already built up an impressive success record in CID though he was not yet forty. His mildness was deceptive. His bite was worse than his bark on occasions.

  Inskip shrugged. ‘Kropotkin – isn’t he a spent force nowadays?’

  ‘Men like Kropotkin are never a spent force.’

  The Russian-born Peter Kropotkin styled himself an anarchist-communist, another exile who had escaped to England, where he’d now lived for many years. Philosopher, writer and revolutionary, he was loved and revered by his countrymen, and by now regarded as the Grand Old Man of the Russian extreme nationalist movement. But since this didn’t extend to his advocating the overthrow of the British throne, he was allowed to spend his exile in England, tolerated and even much admired by many of the British intelligentsia.

  ‘That’s true, but do you really believe someone like Lydia Challoner could have been mixed up in all these plots, with those ruffians? That she did something to upset them and they killed her for it?’ Inskip argued. ‘It’s surely more likely she was killed for some private grudge that had nothing to do with them. The Letts aren’t the only ones who can get hold of Mausers.’ He wanted it to be so: a man shooting her because she had played him false; a jealous woman, even, shooting her rival. Although it had to be said, chasing East End troublemakers was more to his liking. He didn’t have much patience or understanding of people like the Challoners and the spheres they moved in.

  ‘Open minds, Inskip, open minds. We don’t know about any Russian connection, of course, but there’s enough for us to keep at it. Find out more about who she associated with. It’s a queer set up whichever way you look at it. Somebody had it in for her, even if it wasn’t one of the Letts. Maybe someone who wants us to believe it was them. By the way, there’s a nephew, too. Runs a paper called Britannia Voice.’

  Inskip knew of the Voice, a newish paper with its offices in Whitechapel, but not much of its editor. There were as many of these little papers around here as there were political factions, all with their own axes to grind. ‘I’ve heard of him, that’s all. Bit of a Bolshie, like the rest, isn’t he?’

  ‘Socialist, he calls himself. Sent down from Cambridge. He writes inflammatory articles, speaks at meetings, advocates protest – though non-violent, as far as I’m aware.’ Inskip raised his eyebrows. Protest without violence in those parts was like bread without butter.

  The telephone rang. Gaines rose and unhooked the instrument, held it to his ear and spoke into the mouthpiece. Inskip stood up to leave but he was motioned to stay. The conversation seemed to be all at the other end, and he sat back, thinking about what had just been said.

  Not one policeman in London had forgotten those Russian-led murders in Houndsditch just before Christmas – nor were they likely to, considering the three men killed and the two who had been critically injured were their colleagues, unarmed against a gang of Latvians intent on tunnelling into a jeweller’s shop to steal the contents of his safe. It had been a disorganised attempt; the noise they had made alerted someone to send for the police. Accustomed to the brutal methods of capture and torture by the police in their own country, the robbers, armed to the teeth, had had no hesitation in shooting before escaping.

  The shock had run through the Force like an electrical charge. The public’s sense of fair play was outraged. Unarmed British police, officers of the law going about their business, killed by foreign immigrants? The affair was disgraceful.

  But although it had taken some time, eventually the escaped Houndsditch murderers had been traced to Stepney, to a house in Sidney Street, and on a snowy day in early January the house was besieged by the marshalled forces of the police, this time armed. A detachment of the Scots Guards had been called in to assist. The houses along the street had been evacuated and the area cordoned off but the operations were not helped by the general public crowding the surrounding streets, climbing on to the roofs of nearby houses and hanging out of windows in the hope of glimpsing something exciting. On the second day the Home Secretary himself, Mr Churchill, was cheered when he appeared and joined th
e police. The situation had been in danger of turning into a farce, Inskip recalled. Though bullets were whizzing around no one seemed to realise it was not a spectator sport, that the gunmen inside the house were desperadoes, prepared to shoot to the death.

  The shoot-out had only ended when a fire broke out in the house, either by a shot having ruptured a gas pipe or the gang staging an unsuccessful smokescreen. The fire raged until eventually the house collapsed. Two charred bodies were subsequently recovered but the man thought to have been the leader, the so-called mastermind, was nowhere to be found. Peter Piatkov. Peter the Painter, they called him. Artist or house painter, take your choice. A weedy-looking individual but responsible for the biggest police operation and search ever launched, but with now no hope whatsoever of him turning up. Not after the lack of response to the offer of an unimaginable five-hundred-pound reward for information on his whereabouts.

  Trying to link the killing of a lady such as Lydia Challoner with this sort of intrigue would be flogging a dead horse.

  Gaines finished his call. He hooked the receiver to its stand and sat back, stroking his moustache. It was unfashionable and made him look older. Perhaps that was why he wore it. Inskip himself was clean-shaven – or until late afternoon, when he began to look blue around the jawline. ‘Marcus Villiers,’ Gaines said. ‘Looks like a visit to that young fellow’s on the cards. Better still, have him brought in here.’