by Alex Grecian
Blackleg didn’t miss the accusation in Hammersmith’s expression.
“God’s truth, yer honor. Any rate, I was down there and I happened to spy a thing through the window that’s unsettled me some’at.”
“Looking through the window, were you?”
“Just glanced, is all. I’m not a peep. Just had a little glance as I rolled over on me side to get a good sleep.”
“Of course. Go on.”
“Well, look for yerself. Me, I don’t quite know what to make of it.”
Hammersmith kept his eye on Blackleg as he descended the steps to the sunken area. It was an ideal spot for the criminal to mug him, but if Blackleg intended to harm him, Hammersmith suspected the attack would have come in the alley.
He squatted on a bed of cedar mulch and peered into the room beyond the window. Within the semi-gloom he could make out the distinct shapes of furniture: three chairs, a small table, a sofa, all covered in heavy white cloths. The wall to the left was dominated by an enormous fireplace with a marble hearth that jutted into the first third of the room. Above the mantel and dotting the other walls was a collection of recent Impressionist paintings that looked valuable to Hammersmith’s untrained eye. A Turkish rug was rolled up in the far corner, unfurled at the end so that the deep blues and reds of the carpet’s pattern gleamed in a shaft of sunlight that shot past Hammersmith’s shoulder. He turned and Blackleg was standing by his side, watching the policeman anxiously.
“It appears uncommonly well appointed for a servant’s room, if that’s what it is,” Hammersmith said. “But that’s hardly cause for concern.”
“Look harder, sir. Look over there.”
Hammersmith frowned and looked again at the massive fireplace. The grate was folded to one side and a set of fireplace tools stood neatly against the stones. Hammersmith counted a bellows, tongs, a poker and shovel. A selection of ladles and spoons hung from an iron bar bolted to the bricks, and a toaster, its rectangular slots rusted and black with soot, rested by itself on the right-hand side of the hearth. Something worked at the periphery of Hammersmith’s vision, and he turned his gaze to the black maw of the fireplace itself. There. He drew back and looked up at Blackleg, who nodded.
“Now you see it.”
“What is it?”
“’Fraid it’s a chavy, sir. Too small to be aught else.”
“Why did you go for the police? Why not sod off and leave it be?”
“Told you, sir. I’m right sure it’s a chavy. That ain’t proper.”
Hammersmith nodded and pushed at the pane of glass in front of him. It gave way. The window was unlocked. He felt along the edge of it for damage and ran his fingers over splintered wood. It confirmed for him that Blackleg had broken into the house, but Hammersmith kept that knowledge to himself. There was no sense in scaring the criminal away. Blackleg might still prove to be a useful witness.
Hammersmith swung his legs over the windowsill and dropped down into the room. Dust swam aimlessly through the solitary beam of sunlight. Hammersmith was sure that Blackleg had rolled up the rug in the corner of the room, planning to cart it away, before he made his lurid discovery.
“Hello?” Hammersmith said.
He raised his voice and hollered again, louder this time.
“Hello? Is anybody home? Police.”
Silence answered him. The brownstone had the feel of a long-abandoned place. No homeowner was within earshot.
Behind him, Hammersmith heard Blackleg drop to the floor. He turned and Blackleg nodded at him. The two men walked to the fireplace, and Hammersmith knelt on the hearth. He reached out toward the shoe that dangled from the chimney and prodded it with his nightstick. There was clearly a foot in it. A body was stuck up inside the chimney.
Hammersmith paused and glanced back again at Blackleg. The other man’s expression mirrored his own. The shoe hanging down below the top edge of the fireplace’s mouth was small enough to fit in the palm of Hammersmith’s hand. They were looking at the foot of a chavy: a dead child.
Hammersmith grabbed the child’s ankle in both hands and pulled. Nothing happened. The body was wedged in tight. He braced himself and pulled again. He felt something shift above him.
“Come here and help.”
Blackleg squatted on the marble slab next to Hammersmith and the two men pulled together. The child’s trouser leg ripped and the shoe thumped into the ashes below. Both men fell backward on their rumps and coughed as a cloud of ash and dust billowed out at them. A rasping sound echoed through the room, and a moment later the entire body dropped from the chimney and tumbled out onto the hearth.
Hammersmith pulled his shirt over his mouth and nose, shielding himself from the swirling ash, and scrambled forward until he was leaning over the body. He wiped soot away from the blackened face and stared heavily down at the face of a boy who could not have been a day over five years old.
INTERLUDE 1
COLLIER, WALES, EIGHTEEN YEARS EARLIER.
Nevil Hammersmith was the smallest boy in the village of Collier. With a piece of coal, he had marked his height on the doorpost of the room he shared with his three sisters, and each morning he stood against it. He held his palm flat against the top of his head and moved carefully away to see whether his hand had risen higher than the black smudge on the wood behind him. Each morning his hand was even with the mark. He was almost five years old and he had not grown since his fourth birthday.
His morning ritual of measurement was a hasty thing. His father shook him quietly awake before dawn, six days a week, and Nevil was expected to stumble into his clothes (generally left in a heap on the floor the previous night) and sneak out of the room without waking his sisters. They had housework and chores to tend to on the small farm, but he let them sleep.
Nevil and his father left by the front door. The back door was for the girls. The pigs were corralled behind the main house, and it was bad luck to see a pig before the day began. Nevil’s father hung an arm over his shoulder as they walked and Nevil felt proud, grown-up. He pushed away thoughts of the day ahead and focused, instead, on the moment, basking in his father’s easy camaraderie.
At the mine, they lit candle stubs and entered the huge main chamber. The overman wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and Nevil was glad for that. The last time he’d seen the overman, it was for a whipping with the yard wand.
Nevil’s father checked in for them both and then left the chamber without looking back, headed for the tunnel he’d been working the day before. When he had gone out of sight, Nevil turned and scampered into his own tunnel.
The tunnel was hard-packed dirt, shored up on both sides by thick wooden beams hammered into the walls at regular intervals. Side tunnels branched out every few yards, and ponies trotted past Nevil pulling coal carts from deep in the mountain. As Nevil hurried forward, the ceiling of the shaft ahead of him grew lower and the walls gradually pushed inward until there was no room left for a pony to travel. He blew out his short candle. There was always the danger of gas pockets down here, and the candle wouldn’t last long, anyway. He moved forward in the dark, feeling for trapdoors ahead of him, closing them behind him before crawling on to each new door. Soon the ceiling was too low for a grown man to stand upright and, as Nevil neared his post, even he had to crouch and then crawl forward. The walls narrowed until there was barely room for a coal cart in the tunnel.
Nevil hated the dark and hated the cramped tunnels, but he felt pride knowing that his job was important and that nobody else could do it. No adult in the village could fit in these tunnels when a cart rolled through. And, as the smallest four-year-old (almost five) in Collier, Nevil could squeeze into the smallest spaces of anybody. There wasn’t much value in being small. This would have to do.
He reached his post behind a trapdoor and whispered, “Hello?”
“Is it you, Nevil?”
“It’s me.”
“The night’s done, then?”
“It’s nearly dawn.”
&n
bsp; “Did you hear?”
“About the South Drift?”
“Yes. I thought maybe you hadn’t heard yet.”
“I heard.”
Nevil’s father had broken the news carefully over supper. Three children from the village, barely older than Nevil, had died in a shaft collapse the day before. Nevil hadn’t known them well, and death was not yet a concept he completely understood, but he had gone to bed shaken and the trio of ashen children had haunted his dreams.
“Have a good day then, Nevil,” Alice said.
He scrunched against the wall as she passed him. Alice was six and would soon be moving to a bigger tunnel. When she was gone, he searched for the warm spot where she had been sitting, but the floor was cold everywhere in the small chamber, and so he found a spot of his own and settled in.
It took a few moments for his body heat to warm the damp wall enough that he didn’t notice the cold anymore. He could feel, rather than hear, the rumble of carts rolling through distant shafts, and he listened for one of the carts to move toward his own tunnel. If a cart came through this tunnel, Nevil would have to quickly open and shut the trap so that the tunnel would remain properly ventilated. That was the entirety of the job: twelve hours of opening and closing this trapdoor, six days a week, for two cents a day. As he grew, he knew he would move on to larger tunnels. By the time he hit puberty, he would be on his hands and knees pushing coal through these same tunnels every day, and smaller children would have taken his place behind the doors, listening for his cart.
But he knew that he would never take his father’s place in the newer shafts, pounding out the black nuggets and loading them into empty carts to be rolled away down the tunnels by someone else’s children. Nevil had no idea how he would escape the mine, but he had no intention of spending his entire life there the way that his grandfather had and the way that his father would. Nevil could see the cycle of life and death that took place down in the dark behind the village, and he was determined to break it. It could be done. His uncle George had run off to London and joined the navy when he was sixteen. Nevil had never met him, but George had become a family legend, a whisper passed around among the children. Someday Nevil would go to the city himself, and he would find a job he could be good at, and he would never return to Collier.
And when he had children of his own, they would spend their days in the sun.
He listened to the dark. Water dripped from the ceiling, plonking onto the dirt beside him. Rats scurried somewhere to his left, coming closer, then scuttling away whenever he moved his legs. He closed his eyes (there was no point in keeping them open), but he was careful not to fall asleep. If the mine’s deputy caught him sleeping, it would mean ten lashes from the overman’s yard wand again.
When his stomach began to rumble, he opened his pack and felt for the jam sandwich he’d brought with him. One of the braver rats crawled up his leg, attracted by the jam scent, and Nevil dropped a few sandwich crumbs onto his lap. The rat was warm and Nevil didn’t mind its little claws. He ate slowly, aware that the sound of his own chewing could drown out the noise of an approaching cart and cause him to miss his cue.
When the sandwich was gone, the rat left him and Nevil went back to listening. Listening and waiting. The day ground forward and Nevil opened his trapdoor four times, closed it again each time, and returned to his thoughts until he heard a voice on the other side of the door.
“Nevil?”
“Alice, is that you?”
“It’s me.”
“Is the sun still up?”
“It’s already gone down. I’m late, Nevil. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Have a good night, Alice.”
“You, too, Nevil.”
He crawled past her and moved up the tunnel. His father would be waiting for him.
As they left the main chamber, Nevil searched the sky for Orion’s Belt and gulped the fresh night air. He listened to the crickets in the stubbly grass beside the road. His father’s knobby fingers, black with coal dust, closed on Nevil’s shoulder and squeezed gently. Nevil smiled and enjoyed the moment while it lasted. There were still chores to do on the farm before supper and bed, but it hadn’t been a bad day. Nevil had been luckier than the lost children of the South Drift. He might still escape the tunnels.
9
French Upholstery and Fine Furniture was a small shop on Charles Street, between Euston Station and Regent’s Park, and perhaps a quarter of a mile from University College Hospital. Day had chosen it for its proximity to the scene where Inspector Little’s body was found. On his way there, he stopped at the hospital and collected Dr Kingsley, who brought the button found in the bottom of Little’s trunk.
A tiny bell over the doorway jingled as they entered. Inside, the shop was dim but pleasant. Two graceful armchairs, with high oval backs and brocade seats, were displayed on a low wooden platform near the door. A small Gothic Revival table sat between them as if in preparation for tea. The place smelled of sawdust and furniture varnish. Day smiled. The odor reminded him of his father’s carpentry shed in back of the family house.
At the sound of the bell, a small round man scurried out from a back room. He sported enormous muttonchops, perhaps to compensate for the sparse growth on top of his head. Wire-rimmed spectacles perched on the tip of his nose. Day resisted the urge to reach out and push them up on the man’s face.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen,” the man said, “to what do we owe the honor today?”
“Good afternoon, sir,” Day said. “This is Dr Kingsley, and I’m Inspector Day of the Yard. We’d like a moment of your time, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Oh, dear me. Oh, dear. Is there any possibility you’ve only come here for furniture? Any chance at all?”
“I’m afraid not, sir.”
“No chance, you say? You know, I also reupholster older items. Older and newer items. I can reupholster new items to make them look like they was much more dear than they cost you. Much more dear.”
“Thank you, no. We’d like to ask you a few questions. About your working methods and where you may have been last evening. Last evening.”
Day pretended to scratch his nose, covering his mouth so that the furniture man wouldn’t see him smile. He had inadvertently picked up the little man’s method of speech and was repeating himself.
“Oh, my. My, my, my. I was here, right here working into the wee hours, I was.”
“Of course you were,” Kingsley said. “You mentioned just now that you are in the habit of reupholstering furniture? I suppose you use needles, thread, that sort of thing in your work?”
“Of course I do. Of course. Needle and thread are the very foundation of the upholstery trade. And fabric, of course. Fabric and wood and iron. Mustn’t forget those. Fabric and wood most especially. Needle and thread and fabric and wood.”
“Yes. I wonder if you might let us take a look at some of the tools you use in your very interesting trade.”
“And iron. Did I forget iron? There’s a great deal of it used in some styles of furniture, you know. Not all, but some.”
“You did indeed mention iron.”
“Oh, good. Wouldn’t do to forget. Wouldn’t do at all.”
“No, I don’t suppose it would. Your tools, sir?”
“Oh, of course. Please, come with me. Certainly, certainly. Come, come.”
The little man disappeared back through the door on the far wall.
“Our furniture maker seems a bit nervous, doesn’t he?” Kingsley said.
“He certainly does,” Day said. “Certainly, certainly.”
Kingsley smirked and held the door open for Day.
The back room was a workshop, much larger than the storefront that clients saw.
“Forgive the mess,” the little man said. “Wasn’t expecting you or I’d have tidied a bit. Wasn’t expecting anyone at all today. No one at all. Although of course one
hopes for a smidgeon of surprise if one can get it. If it comes. If it’s good.”
“I’m sorry,” Day said. “We didn’t catch your name, sir.”
“Oh, my. Unforgivable of me. Absolutely unforgivable. Where are my manners?”
Day waited. The little man bustled about, picking up bits of material and setting them next to other things without appearing to bring any order to the space. Giant spools of twine were strung on a series of bars that ran across the wall behind the main workspace. Shelves on the west wall of the room were lined with smaller spools of thread and fine chain stuck on pegs. The opposite wall was covered with bolts of fabric, jutting out on long wooden arms. A sewing machine was bolted to a stained but solid worktable that filled the center of the room. The rest of the table was covered with a jumble of fabric pieces and pots and brushes, loose springs and dowels and bins full of buttons. Behind the table, partially obscured by it, the corpse of a sofa squatted, its arms and back exposed, bits of cotton batting stapled haphazardly to its naked skeleton.
“Your name, sir?”
“Oh, my name. Oh, of course. My name is Frederick French. French as in French Furniture, you see, although too many think I work only with French imports. French imports from France, I mean.”
“I see.”
“Oh, no, no, no. I don’t mean that I do work with imports. Although of course I do. Of course I do. I’m perfectly capable of working with imported furniture and do so all the time. But I named the shop after myself, not after the country of France, you see?”
“We do see. We do.”
“Good, good.”
“You say you were here all evening last?”
“Yes. I’m afraid this poor chesterfield was rather badly abused by its former owner, and it’s taking some time to get it back up to snuff. Poor thing. One shouldn’t have children if one wants to own fine furniture. Really, one shouldn’t. Children are a bane.”
