Ruler of the Night

by David Morrell

  But Becker had spent five years patrolling the East End’s Wapping district and was so familiar with its horrors that, as he walked past the Tower of London, one of its boundaries, he felt he was almost coming home, although his memory of the murders there in December made it a reluctant homecoming.

  Some of Wapping’s structures were as old as any in London, a few having even survived the Great Fire of London almost two hundred years earlier. Each building’s listing walls and buckling roofs provided meager shelter for dozens of wretched families. The odors were as revolting as the filth on the cobblestones. Ragged creatures huddled in doorways and alleys, sobbing. The smoke-laden fog always seemed darkest and thickest here, an effect that was now emphasized by the lowering sun.

  As a figure came around a hazy corner, Becker braced himself in case of trouble. Anywhere else, Becker’s apparel looked ordinary, but here, his common clothes made him appear temptingly wealthy.

  The figure turned out to be a constable. He studied Becker in the fading light, apparently trying to understand what someone who was not in rags was doing there.

  “Come back to commit more crimes, have you?” The constable grinned. “I never thought I’d see your ugly face again.”

  “Evans? Is it you?”

  Laughing, they shook hands.

  “I didn’t think I’d ever see your ugly features again either,” Becker said.

  “Almost didn’t recognize you out of uniform. Come to lord it over me, have you? How does it feel to be a detective?”

  “I wish I knew. It’ll be a while before I learn enough to feel that I’m truly a detective.”

  “At a guess, it could only be business that brings you back to this miserable place,” Evans said.

  “I’m on my way to the station house.” Becker stomped his boots on the squalid stones to keep his feet from turning numb as he’d done so many times when he’d patrolled this area. “I need to talk to a constable here. John Saltram. Maybe you remember him from roll call.”

  “Indeed. I don’t suppose you can tell me why you wish to talk to him.” Evans looked eager for gossip.

  Becker shrugged.

  “Become a cagey devil, have you? Well, never mind. I’ll save you the walk to the station house. Saltram left the force.”

  “Left the…when did this happen?”

  “Not long after you were promoted. Headquarters gave Saltram permission to marry. His bride’s a laundress with ambition. She persuaded him that, with his experience as a constable, he ought to hire himself out as a private-inquiry agent.”

  Evans put significance into the final words. Until three years earlier, private-inquiry agents had been almost nonexistent in England. But that had changed in 1852, when London’s most famous police officer, Inspector Charlie Field, resigned and opened a private-inquiry bureau. Claiming that he’d been the model for the mysterious Inspector Bucket in Dickens’s novel Bleak House, Fields attracted numerous clients by offering confidential investigative services that the police weren’t willing to provide.

  “Saltram’s wife turned out to be as smart as she was ambitious,” Evans continued. “She told him to go where the money is and advertise himself to lawyers in the City.”

  “Advertise himself to lawyers?” Becker managed to keep his voice neutral.

  “Apparently it worked,” Evans said. “I heard that Saltram’s situation improved enough that he moved to better lodgings. Maybe I should become a private-inquiry agent and get out of this godforsaken place.”

  “Any idea where Saltram lives?” Becker asked.

  “He bragged about going to Southwark.”

  As its name implied, Southwark was south of the Thames. A working-class neighborhood with a weekly market and a well-known cathedral, it managed to avoid the despair of the East End.

  Surrounded by bitter-cold fog, Becker walked across London Bridge. As he chewed the last of three stale biscuits he’d purchased from a bakeshop that was about to close, his fatigue tempted him to return to the police dormitory and postpone his quest until the morning.

  But what would Ryan do? he asked himself.

  He found a constable in Wellington Street, near the London Bridge railway terminus. “Where’s your station house?”

  “Two streets that way.”

  It was literally a house—or, rather, two adjoining houses that had been combined to accommodate offices and cells.

  Welcoming the heat from a corner fireplace, Becker showed his badge to a sergeant behind a desk. “Ever heard of John Saltram?”

  “I heard of him, all right,” the sergeant answered. “He came in here two weeks ago, making certain we all knew he’d been a constable. He said he was a private-inquiry agent now, as if he was royalty. He told us we could count on him in an emergency, and he hoped he could count on us to help him in return if he ever needed information. He was so full of himself, we had quite a chuckle after he left.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “Oh, he told us several times where we could reach him if we needed his help. He even gave me a note with his address and suggested that maybe his street could have a little extra attention. What do you want with him?”

  “Just something he might remember from when he patrolled in Wapping.”

  “And you came here after dark, shivering in the cold, simply because you’re curious that he might remember something from when he patrolled in Wapping?”

  “Well, maybe I want a little more than that. Maybe I could use a constable to come with me.”

  “I’ll go with you myself. Could be I’ll find a chance to needle him.” The sergeant called to a constable in a hallway, “Williams, take charge. I’m stepping out for a while.”

  Mercifully, Becker didn’t need to walk much farther. Guiding the way with a bull’s-eye lantern, the sergeant led him to a tavern at the next corner.

  “This is where Saltram spends most of his time,” the sergeant said, opening the door.

  The narrow interior was filled with pipe smoke, loud conversations, and the odor of stale beer. The sergeant squeezed his way between two burly men at the counter and told the barkeep, “We’re looking for John Saltram.”

  “Haven’t seen him since last night,” the barkeep said, wiping a wet rag across the counter. “He bragged about coming into some extra money and bought drinks for everyone.”

  Becker and the sergeant returned to the street. Halfway along it, the sergeant pointed to an open stairway between a butcher’s shop and a grocer. “He lives there, above the butcher shop.”

  Becker peered up at the window but didn’t see any lamplight.

  “This early, he wouldn’t be asleep,” the sergeant said. “He and the missus must be spending the money he bragged about. If it’s important, you can go back to the station, drink some hot tea, and try again later.”

  The offer was tempting. Becker’s legs ached. He hadn’t sat down in hours.

  But what would Ryan do? he thought again.

  A lamp glowed in the butcher’s shop. A window revealed a man in a stained apron putting away chunks of meat. When Becker opened the door, the butcher looked hopeful that this was a customer, but then he saw the sergeant behind Becker.

  The shop was cold. March’s low temperature helped to prevent the meat from spoiling. Even so, the pungent odor of blood was strong.

  “Have you seen John Saltram today?” Becker asked.

  “No, and it’s a good thing for him I didn’t.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I’ve got some choice things to say to him about waking me up,” the butcher said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I live behind the shop.” The butcher pointed toward the ceiling. “Early this morning, Saltram and his wife had a row. I never got back to sleep.”

  “Early this morning?” Becker repeated.

  “Shouts and pounding and such.”

  Becker closed the shop door and peered up the dark stairway. An uneasy feeling grew inside him, making
him feel colder.

  “Stay behind me,” he told the sergeant.

  “Why? What’s the matter?”

  Becker climbed the narrow steps. The sergeant followed with his lantern. The creaking of the boards sounded unnervingly loud.

  At the top, Becker reached a door. In the gathering silence, he listened but didn’t hear anything behind it.

  He drew a knife from a scabbard under his right trouser leg. Ryan had taught him to carry it. But use the blunt end before you use the sharp one, Ryan had warned. And make sure you have an explanation ready for Commissioner Mayne.

  “Hey, what are you doing with that?” the sergeant asked.

  “Quiet.”

  Becker knocked on the door. It moved.

  He pushed it open. Maybe he smelled blood because of the butcher shop below, but he didn’t think so.

  With the lantern behind him, he saw a small room that had a chair and a table. The chair lay sideways on the floor.

  A man lay next to it.

  “Sergeant, stay where you are,” Becker said.

  The lantern revealed dried blood on the floor. Careful not to step in it, Becker approached the body.

  The man was sprawled on his back. Standing, he would have been tall. He looked solidly built and had the weathered face typical of constables. His nightshirt was crusted with dried blood.

  Recognizing Saltram from when they’d worked together, Becker tried to control his breathing. Remember what Ryan told you, he thought. Distract yourself with details. Focus on finding evidence so whoever did this won’t be able to do it again.

  His mouth dry, Becker glanced behind him toward the open doorway, trying to reconstruct what had happened. The nightshirt suggested that Saltram had been in bed. Had a knock on the door wakened him? When he groggily opened the door, had a knife to his chest caused him to stumble back and collapse, gripping the chair and pulling it over as he toppled?

  Becker stared at a farther doorway. Forcing himself, he proceeded toward a small bedroom. He prepared for an attack, although he couldn’t imagine that the killer would still be here after all this time.

  At the bedroom’s entrance, he saw more dried blood on the floor. The lantern cast a shadow that prevented him from seeing farther. Only when he stepped to the side did he discover a woman lying crossways and face-up on the bed.

  Her eyes peered toward the ceiling, dull and unblinking. The front of her nightdress was covered with dried blood.

  Becker’s heart beat faster as he led the sergeant outside and closed the door. “Stay here,” he said quickly. “Don’t go back in, and don’t let anyone past you unless it’s someone I sent.”

  No longer caring about the noise he made, Becker raced down the stairs, his frantic footsteps thundering.

  FOUR

  THE WOMAN WHO THOUGHT THAT RATS WERE GHOSTS

  Parliament usually didn’t adjourn until at least one in the morning. Standing in the yellow light from gas lamps along the walls, Lord Palmerston silently bemoaned the fact that it was only a few minutes past midnight. England’s most powerful politician, a former war secretary, foreign secretary, and home secretary, he’d hoped that after five decades of service, he’d have learned to tolerate the tedium of government, but the truth was, as he sank into his seat after having delivered a defense of his war policy, he felt tired.

  Despite the cold March weather outside, the chamber—no matter how large it was—felt hot and smothering. The faces scowling at him from the tiered benches across the aisle made him wish that he’d never acceded to the queen’s request to become prime minister after the previous government had collapsed because of its gross misconduct of the war. Now he himself was being accused of the same ineptness, and it took all his resolve not to blurt to these fools that if they left the matter in his hands, if decisions didn’t need to be passed through countless committees, suffering compromise after compromise at each stage, if he could act on his own authority, using his own resources, he would defeat the Russians within the year.

  An opposition member made a jeering remark to someone speaking on Lord Palmerston’s behalf. Palmerston almost stood to rebut the rebuttal of the rebuttal when a messenger bent beside him.

  “This came for you, Prime Minister, from Commissioner Mayne.” The messenger gave him an envelope sealed with wax. “He said it was urgent.”

  Lord Palmerston attempted to look unconcerned. Glancing around the chamber, he noted that his home secretary, Sir George Grey, was being handed a similar envelope. Hoping that he appeared merely irritated by a minor disturbance, Lord Palmerston broke the envelope’s seal, pulled out a sheet of paper, and shielded the stark words that informed him

  THE VICTIM ON THE TRAIN WAS DANIEL HARCOURT.

  Despite the note’s brevity, he felt stunned. It had been shocking enough that, for the first time, someone had been murdered on a train—slaughtered, in fact—and not merely a common laborer in a third-class carriage but a gentleman in the very best accommodation that the railway could provide. Now the shock was magnified as Lord Palmerston learned the victim’s identity. He didn’t dare allow his enemies to detect the note’s impact. Trying to look annoyed by an unimportant interruption, he slid the piece of paper back into the envelope.

  “The commissioner is waiting in the corridor,” the messenger said, then retreated.

  Lord Palmerston put a hand to his mouth, seeming to stifle a yawn. He glanced toward Sir George, nodded slightly, and stood as another opposition member began a complaint. Lord Palmerston hoped that his exit would communicate indifference and not urgency. After passing through swinging doors, he reached a long stone corridor that was mercifully cooler than the chamber he had left.

  Commissioner Mayne, looking his usual gaunt self, stood near an alcove, the gas lamp of which had been dimmed. When Sir George came through the swinging doors, Lord Palmerston led the way to the alcove.

  The three of them stepped into its shadows.

  “Are you certain that the victim was Daniel Harcourt?” Lord Palmerston asked the commissioner, keeping his voice low.

  “Inspector Ryan was able to determine his identity only this evening. He assures me there’s no doubt.”

  Lord Palmerston’s mind continued to reel from having learned that his personal solicitor—a friend and one of the most influential lawyers in all of England—was the victim on the train. “Heaven help him.”

  “What would possess anyone to do this?” the home secretary asked tensely. His cabinet position made him Commissioner Mayne’s superior, putting him in charge of all police matters in Great Britain.

  “Ryan doesn’t believe the motive was money,” Mayne answered. “He thinks—and De Quincey thinks this also—that it had something to do with documents Harcourt was carrying.”

  “De Quincey,” Lord Palmerston murmured, his annoyance intruding on his grief.

  “He and Inspector Ryan believe that’s why Harcourt was going to Sedwick Hill—to deliver documents to someone. But the constables I sent can’t find anyone there who knows him.”

  Sedwick Hill, Lord Palmerston thought. As when he’d first heard about the murder, he felt his stomach tense at the mention of the victim’s destination. This was the worst possible time to draw attention to Sedwick Hill. Of all places, why the deuce had Daniel been going there?

  “If Inspector Ryan and De Quincey are correct, we need to wonder what sort of documents would have caused Mr. Harcourt’s murder as well as that of a private-inquiry agent who was employed by him,” Commissioner Mayne continued.

  “What? A private-inquiry agent was killed also?” the home secretary asked.

  “We only recently learned about him. Does the name John Saltram sound familiar to you?” the commissioner asked.

  “No.”

  “Nor to me,” Lord Palmerston said. “A private-inquiry agent? Are you suggesting that Mr. Harcourt was killed because of something the agent learned during an investigation?”

  “That’s a possibility, given that numer
ous members of the government were Harcourt’s clients.”

  “How do you know this?” the home secretary asked abruptly.

  “Inspector Ryan saw various names on folders in Mr. Harcourt’s office, including yours, Sir George, and yours, Prime Minister,” Commissioner Mayne replied.

  “Surely you don’t suspect that we or anyone else in the government killed Mr. Harcourt,” Lord Palmerston said.

  “Of course not,” the commissioner answered. “But he had secrets that were evidently important enough for someone to kill him in order to learn those secrets or perhaps to prevent those secrets from being exposed.”

  “Who else knows the names of Mr. Harcourt’s clients?” Lord Palmerston demanded.

  Down the corridor, the swinging doors were brushed open. A member of the opposition stepped out, noticed them in the alcove, nodded, and proceeded past them, obviously curious about their intense discussion.

  They waited until the reverberation of the man’s footsteps diminished into silence. The only sound became the droning of a speech beyond the swinging doors.

  “Who else is aware of the names?” Lord Palmerston repeated.

  “Inspector Ryan told no one except me,” Commissioner Mayne responded. “Prime Minister, forgive me for seeming forward, but I’m obligated to explore every possibility. Did either of you enlist Mr. Harcourt to investigate anyone as part of an unofficial government inquiry?”

  “I made no such request of him,” Lord Palmerston said.

  “Nor did I,” the home secretary added. “What sort of government inquiry are you imagining?”

  “Again, I apologize if I seem to be overstepping, but given Mr. Harcourt’s close relationship with members of the government, and given that there’s a war in progress—”

  “The war? You think this has something to do with the Russians?” Lord Palmerston asked in surprise.

  “The newspaper reports have yet to appear, but already rumors about Mr. Harcourt’s murder are swirling. In the streets, my constables heard people wonder if the Russians are attempting to make them fear the trains. Prime Minister, could your foreign secretary or possibly someone in the War Office have requested Mr. Harcourt to conduct a secret investigation, perhaps about a Russian spy?”