by Alex Grecian
14
Constable Nevil Hammersmith didn’t return home until after midnight. The flat was empty. Colin Pringle was still away on his date with the shopgirl, Maggie.
Hammersmith and Pringle shared a two-bedroom flat above a confectioner’s shop. The aroma of chocolate and sugar filled the rooms day and night, and they were locked in a constant battle with rats that migrated upstairs and skittered through the walls. The entirety of the floor above them was leased by a young man who received a yearly stipend of five hundred pounds from his grandmother. He didn’t need a flatmate. Hammersmith and Pringle, being eligible men of no social standing and of limited means, struggled to make their rent each month.
Despite the hour, Hammersmith started a fire. His thoughts returned to the dead boy, and he unconsciously studied the dimensions of his own fireplace. It was, he thought, too small for even a child to fit in, too narrow for anyone of any size to shimmy up. When the fire was going, he put the kettle on to boil. He lifted the teapot and a small tin of tea from the mantel and spooned green leaves into the pot. Pringle generally filled the tin with “renewed” tea from a street vendor who collected used leaves from people in the neighborhood. The damp tea leaves were dried, spiced, and colored green with copper. It was weak but affordable. When the water began to boil, Hammersmith poured it from the kettle into the teapot and fit the lid back on. While the tea steeped, he paced back and forth through the small parlor.
A piece of paper, disturbed by the breeze he was creating, fluttered at the edge of his vision as he passed by the door to his bedroom. A note was tacked to the wall there and he pulled it down, leaving the tack where it was. He read it and tossed it into the fire. He rubbed the back of his neck and forced his thoughts to return to the case at hand.
He was startled from his reverie by irregular footsteps in the hall, and a moment later, Pringle staggered into the flat and tossed his hat on the well-worn chair by the door.
“Hullo, old boy.”
Pringle’s face was red, and Hammersmith could see a smudge on the knee of his flatmate’s trousers. A sober Pringle would never be seen in soiled clothes.
“How’s Maggie?” Hammersmith said.
“Oh, my dear Mr Hammersmith, Maggie’s fine, all right. Quite fine, indeed.”
“Good to hear.”
“And what are you doing awake and prowling about at this beastly hour?”
“I’ve made tea.”
“Thank you. I’ll have some.”
“Good.”
Hammersmith strained the tea into two cups and set them on the small table under the window. The curtains were drawn back, and outside on the street, sweepers were already hard at work, shoveling horseshit into their foul carts, trying to get a head start on the coming day’s traffic.
“There’s no milk.”
“Did we drink it all?”
“It was spoilt.”
“You threw it out?”
“Should I have kept spoilt milk?”
“Well, I suppose we’ll have more in the morning.”
“Not long now. Still, there’s no milk.”
Pringle shrugged and burnt his tongue on the tea.
“Let it sit,” Hammersmith said.
“Easy for you to say. I’ve already burnt myself. Say, did you get the note I left? There was a message sent over from a doctor at St Thomas’ this evening. Dr Brindle, I think his name was.”
Hammersmith blew across the surface of the tea and took a sip. He could taste the sharp tang of copper and wished again that they could afford to spring for fresh tea.
“I got it,” he said.
“You ought to visit him. Sounds like the old man’s not long for this world.”
“There’s no sense in it, Colin. He doesn’t know me anymore.”
“It might do you some good to say your piece to him. Whether he knows you or not.”
“If I get the time.”
Pringle nodded and tested his tea with a finger. Hammersmith was grateful that his flatmate didn’t press the issue. He hadn’t visited his father in months. The last time he’d been to St Thomas’ Hospital, his father had called him a stranger and cursed at him, the stream of invective finally halted by a spasm of coughing and a spray of blood across the dirty white sheets in the consumptive ward. Hammersmith wanted to remember his father as a tall, strong man with a ready smile and quick hands, not as the shrunken, angry old man who had to be tied to a bed so that he wouldn’t bite the nurses who fed him.
“It’s not just him eating at you, is it?” Pringle said. “I can see by that faraway dreamy look on your face that there’s a case boiling away inside your skull.” He sat forward in his armchair and scowled at Hammersmith. “Was there something in that thug’s story, then?”
Hammersmith nodded, glad to put his father out of his mind for the moment.
“A child,” he said. “A dead boy in one of the homes along the row there.”
“Damn it all, I should have gone with you.”
“Nothing you could have done to change things. The boy was long since dead and stuffed up a chimney.”
“Stuffed up?” Pringle gazed into his tea for a moment before looking up. “Stuffing a body up a chimney’s no easy feat. Could the boy have been dead in advance and stiff? If he was rigorous stiff, it might make it easier to push him upward.”
“I may have misspoke. Stuffed isn’t the right word for it. It appears the boy crawled up the flue of his own accord. Got stuck and was left there.”
“Oh, so it was a climber.” Pringle sat back again and took another sip of tea.
“Yes, I think the boy was a climber,” Hammersmith said. “But climbers shouldn’t be abandoned in chimneys.”
“Of course not. But the job does come with risks, and it follows that croaking in a chimney is one of them risks.”
“No five-year-old should be made to face those risks. What five-year-old would even understand that kind of risk, let alone agree to it?”
“Whoa,” Pringle said. He waved his arm at Hammersmith and tea sloshed out of his cup, dotting his shirtfront. “Oh, damn.”
He stood and Hammersmith handed him a cloth from the table. Pringle dabbed at his shirt, shaking his head.
“Too much drink, I think.”
“It’ll come out.”
“I’m sure. Never mind the shirt.”
“Never mind the shirt? Who am I talking to? What’s happened to Colin Pringle?”
Hammersmith smiled weakly and Pringle shook his head again.
“No, look, I’ve given the impression that I don’t care about a dead child.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I do. I really do. Every death is a tragedy, but I don’t understand what makes this one so special.”
Hammersmith looked down at his shoes. Hammersmith’s own shoes were old and worn and cracked. They had never been polished. He looked over at Pringle’s shoes, which reflected the room’s ambient lamplight. He and Pringle shared mutual respect, but had nothing in common. They had been thrown together simply because they’d started as constables on the same day at the same station. Pringle cared deeply about the trappings of life. Being a policeman allowed him access to material privileges and opportunities that Hammersmith cared nothing about. The job mattered to Hammersmith. The job and the people who needed him to do that job properly. He had never been able to make Pringle understand.
“It’s not…” he said. “It was a child, Colin. He was used and discarded.”
Pringle nodded, but said nothing. He waited for Hammersmith to continue.
“It’s true, we do see bodies often enough. This was different.”
“They’ll put a detective on it.”
“No. They won’t.”
Pringle was silent for a moment. When he spoke, he kept his eyes on the floor.
“Did they tell you to let it go?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to let it go?”
Hammersmith took another sip o
f tea. It was cold now.
“No.”
Pringle nodded at the floor.
“I’m going round to Kingsley’s,” Hammersmith said, “to see if he has any more information about the body yet.”
“Nevil, no. It’s the middle of the night. He’s a family man. Probably as sound asleep as we should be.”
“He might be awake.”
“He might be, but he won’t want to see our ugly mugs. Let ’im be till morning.”
“I feel restless. I need to act.”
“Well, Kingsley won’t have cut on the body yet, anyway. And besides, what’ll he tell you that you don’t know?”
“You’re right. I know how the boy died.”
“And you know there’s nobody to bring in on this. Nobody killed him. He died of natural causes.”
“Not natural causes.”
“He stopped breathing of his own accord. Nobody held a pillow over his face. There’s nowhere to go with this.”
“And the people he trusted? The ones who abandoned him?”
“What can you do? They’ve broken no law.”
Hammersmith ran a hand over his chin. He needed a shave.
“I can scare them.”
“You’re scaring me right now, Nevil.”
“I need to do something about this. You needn’t involve yourself, but if I sit on my hands here it will eat away at me until there’s nothing left.”
“You could lose your commission. You might as well toss your entire career with the Met on the rubbish pile. You’ll be shoveling horse manure in the street.”
“It’s honest work.”
Pringle shrugged. “It is at that. All right, I’m in.”
“You don’t need to-”
“What’s a mate for, then? I’m in it. But I’d like about three days of sleep first.”
“What about your career?”
“As long as I get to keep the uniform, I’ll be fine.”
Hammersmith grinned and finished his tea. He hardly noticed the metallic aftertaste.
15
Inspector Day walked up Northumberland Street, away from the Yard. His heels clicked on the road and echoed back from the high walls of the hotels on either side of him. There was a hole in the bottom of his left shoe, and he could feel the cold of the paving stones under his feet. The bulk of the Hotel Victoria loomed out of the fog to the left of him, and to the right the Hotel Metropole, tall and elegant. Ahead, a cab rank split the street. In the morning it would be filled with hansoms and buses and growlers, queued up in the median between the great hotels, letting off and picking up and waiting, but now the rank was empty. An omnibus rattled past him, its yellow sides dull in the lamplight, a feedbag hung over the horse’s nose. Day moved aside and watched it disappear into the mist.
The road widened out, and Day crossed the Strand to Trafalgar Square. On a clear day he would be able to see the National Gallery on the other side of the park, but tonight he could barely see fifteen feet in front of him. A tide of mist rolled over and past him. He thought he could make out the pillar with Admiral Lord Nelson’s statue against the pale night sky, but it might have been nothing more than a thin distant layering of fog upon fog. The square was silent, the fountains shut off for the night, and the hugeness and the openness of the space seemed cathedral-like to Day, who was still used to the intimate marshes and woodlands of Devon.
He was at the southeast corner of the park. He oriented himself and walked diagonally toward the far end. Within two or three minutes he came to the outside of a low wall that encircled the nearest fountain. He followed it, walking slowly. This close, he could hear the breeze shaping ripples across the water.
After a few yards the wall angled back north, toward the fountain, and Day stopped at the corner where a massive lamppost squatted, joining the two ends of the wall. He had passed this lamppost before, he thought, but had never noticed how much bigger it was than the others that were dotted about the square. The lantern globe atop its pillar was dark. Day ran his hand over the smooth stone of its base. In the center of the structure was a door, two steps up from the flagstones beneath, and in the center of the door was a small, round knob. Now that he was looking directly at it, it was unmistakable, but he knew that the door went unnoticed by hundreds of passersby every day.
Day turned the knob. Nothing. He stepped up to the windows set into the tiny door and cupped his hands on either side of his eyes. Peering in, he saw only darkness.
He turned and squinted into the mist. London seemed empty of any other human soul. He felt utterly alone, but the Ripper was out there somewhere in the grey city. Or perhaps the Ripper was dead and gone, having destroyed the confidence of the Yard and of the citizens who no longer trusted the Yard to protect them.
Whether he was gone or not, it hardly mattered. Saucy Jack had gifted them all the idea of himself. Others like him circled like lions around the herd. The city was changed.
Day reached into the inside pocket of his overcoat and drew out the flat leather pouch. Atop the array of heavy skeleton keys on their velvet bed was the tiny brass key to the kiosk. He picked it out and turned back to the door. Under the knob was a small keyhole. The key fit perfectly, and Day heard a click when he twisted it. The knob turned under his hand and the door swung open without another sound. He stepped inside.
There was barely enough space within the pillar for two men to stand upright. Aside from the wooden door with its small window, the interior was all of the same stone that made up the outer wall. Day closed the door behind him and passed his hands across the walls. There was a shallow ledge that circled the room at waist level. Perhaps wide enough for a candle. Day reached up and felt along the ceiling. It tapered in the middle, leading up to the lamp outside. He put his hands down and stood, looking out the window at the fog.
There was nothing here.
Whatever this lamppost-station house had represented to Inspector Adrian March, it eluded Walter Day. This was a tiny room in a vast city, and perhaps that was all it was meant to be. One of the many secrets concealed beneath the day-to-day business of the mightiest empire in the history of the world. A place of safety and hidden potential for a policeman who had ultimately been defeated by a killer of women.
Day left the kiosk. He locked the door and put the key back in its pouch. He didn’t know what he’d hoped to find here, but if Detective March had left a message, its meaning was a deeper mystery than Day was prepared to solve.
He walked away from the square and turned toward his home, his wife, and his bed.
16
Hammersmith and Pringle sat on a short wall under the drooping branches of a willow tree. They were across the street from the brownstone where Hammersmith had found the dead boy in a chimney. The street was completely deserted, and Pringle was slumped into Hammersmith’s left shoulder, snoring softly.
The moon hung low in the sky, and Hammersmith could feel the cold stones of the wall through the seat of his trousers. He thought, not for the first time, that it would have been nice if he and Pringle had the funds to sit in a hansom cab in the shadows and watch the house in relative comfort, but cabs were expensive.
Pringle shifted in his sleep, and a wet strand of drool seeped from the corner of his mouth onto Hammersmith’s arm.
Hammersmith had taken care to let no doubt show on his face while discussing the matter with Pringle, but alone in the dark, watching an empty house, and with little prospect of sleep before his next day’s shift, he could feel his confidence ebbing. Pringle was right. So, for that matter, was Inspector Tiffany. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of children died or went missing every year in London. The police lacked the resources to pursue every case, particularly if there was no evidence of a crime.
But he had once been that little boy. He had spent long hours alone in the dark doing a job he didn’t entirely understand. His own circumstances had been different, of course. He had been sent into the mines by his family to earn the money they needed for gr
oceries and medicine. He had felt proud to contribute, useful and grown-up. But the fear and the loneliness had been there with him every minute of every day.
He was certain the boy had shimmied up that chimney on the promise of no greater reward than a smile or a pat on the shoulder or an extra biscuit. To Hammersmith’s way of thinking, that made the chimney sweep, and maybe the people who hired the chimney sweep, criminals no different from highway robbers or pickpockets. Maybe not murderers in any technical sense, but people who should be taken off the streets and locked up for society’s good.
And that was Hammersmith’s job.
From far away he heard the clip-clop of hooves on cobblestones. He leaned back into the shadows of the willow and shook Pringle awake.
“Wha-?”
“Shush. Someone’s coming.”
Pringle nodded and wiped his cheek with the sleeve of his jacket, then frowned at the silvery streak of drool and tried to brush it away.
“Is it them?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“We don’t know anyone’s ever going to return to this place.”
Hammersmith ignored Pringle. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it that night.
The two of them retreated behind the wall and watched as a patch of darkness blacker than the night moved up the street toward them. A pinprick of light bobbed along in time to the sound of the horses’ hooves. When it drew closer to them, the light resolved itself into a lantern on a pole affixed to the side of a great black carriage. Two sweating chargers pulled the carriage up even with the row of houses and stopped beside the wall, snorting and stamping.
After a moment, the driver hopped down from his perch and opened the door on the other side. He fetched a stool from the seat above and placed it on the cobblestones. Hammersmith could see under the carriage as first one foot lowered itself and then another, and a man’s weight eased forward. The feet touched ground and the man turned, apparently to help a woman down because a pair of dainty ankles were briefly visible before the hem of a frilly dress settled, obscuring the view. Another woman followed, then a child. The four pairs of feet moved away from the coach, and the driver jumped back up to his seat and whipped his reins across the horses’ backs. The carriage moved on up the street.
