He tried to calculate exactly where he was. It was a good ten minutes since he’d turned on to Burr Street, so even moving at the slow pace the fog dictated, he should be almost at the end of that street by now. If the public house on the corner were open—if, by some happy chance, the landlord had chosen to disobey the licensing laws—then he would be safe, at least for a while. True, the rough men inside—the dockers and the watermen—might see through his disguise and ridicule him. They might even rob him. But perhaps they would believe what he had to say, too. So that even if this was to be his last night on earth, his death might at least have some purpose.
He reached the corner, and his heart sank as he saw that the pub was shuttered and in total darkness. Where could he go now? he wondered, as his panic increased with every passing second. Where was there left to run to?
Head along Lower East Smithfield, towards Aldermans Stairs! counselled the tiny grain of rational thought still left in his brain.
Yes, that was it! There was another pub on that corner, and even if it was also closed, there was always the chance that there would be a waterman on duty at the Stairs, willing to take him across the Thames—to carry him to safety.
You’re fooling yourself! he thought angrily.
There would be no watermen. Not on a filthy night like this. Yet there was no choice but to cling to that slim hope, because now he was convinced that there was not one set of slithering footsteps behind him, but two.
He turned the corner, and was confronted by a black shape, looming in the darkness. An ambush! Naturally! Why had he ever imagined these people would leave anything to chance?
Perhaps if he could somehow manage to overpower the one ahead, then make a dash for it before the ones behind...
‘Lookin’ fer a good time, duckie?’ asked a cracked female voice.
He could now see the shape for what it was. Nothing but a common prostitute, so desperate to earn her gin money that she was touting for custom even in this weather.
Or was it simply a trick? Was she, in reality, one of them?
He approached the woman cautiously, aware, even as he was doing so, that it would enable the men behind him to gain some ground. She was a small woman, well past her prime, and dressed in other people’s cast-offs. It was hard to believe that she could be part of any conspiracy against him.
The woman lifted her skirt to show that she was wearing no drawers, then turned her back and presented him with her naked, mottled rear.
‘Eivver end,’ she said. ‘I’m not fussy. Long as yer’ve got a tanner, yer can ’ave me any way yer want.’
‘I’m...I’m not here for...for...’ the young man stuttered.
‘Yer won’t get a better offer than that nowhere,’ the woman said, a note of irritation creeping into her voice.
But the young man was already brushing past her and plunging once more into the swirling fog.
Surely he would come across a policeman on duty soon, he told himself. Surely, somewhere on his route, he would find a bobby who could protect him. But would any solitary man—even one wearing a blue uniform—be able to do anything against his ruthless pursuers?
He increased his pace again, but he did not run, because he knew that they would only do the same: and he wanted to have a little energy left in reserve for when he finally reached the desperate conclusion of this chase.
The swishing sound was still hauntingly behind him, but despite his encounter with the prostitute, it did not seem any closer. They were holding back, he decided—waiting until they could catch him in an even more secluded place than this achingly empty street. And he was leading them right to such a place! He knew that. But that same place, as dangerous as it might be, was where his only remaining hope lay.
Like a drowning man, he felt his whole life flash in front of him. The school his parents had sent him—a school he’d hated and where he’d continued to be bullied long beyond the age at which bullying should have stopped. He thought about his stern, unyielding father, his cowed mother, and his baying, opinionated older brother. And he thought about his loving, gentle sister, who had provided the few moments of happiness in his grim existence, and who was—indirectly—responsible for the situation in which he now found himself.
The pub at the edge of Aldermans Stairs was as dark and empty as the one outside which the prostitute had been lurking. And here there were fewer street lamps, so that he was moving in almost total darkness.
He stretched out his foot and felt for the edge of the Stairs.
‘Hello, is there anyone down there?’ he called out, thinking how squeaky and immature his voice sounded.
There was no answer, save for the gentle whoosh of the river.
He cleared his throat. ‘Is there anybody down there?’ he repeated, in a much deeper voice this time.
Once again, there was only silence in response.
He made his way groping down the Stairs. Perhaps he could swim for it, he thought. But he had never been a strong swimmer—never a strong anything if he was honest about it—and he was sure that before he was even half-way across the broad river he would succumb to exhaustion, and sink into oblivion.
He had reached the bottom of the Stairs, and his shin banged against something hard. A boat! By some miracle, one of the watermen—probably too drunk to know what he was doing—had left his boat moored where anyone could take it.
He felt along the edge of the boat until he came to the mooring rope. A miracle, he thought again—the possibility of escape when all such hope had seemed to be gone.
Working in almost total darkness—and with trembling hands—he clawed at the professionally tied knot that kept the boat tethered to the landing stage. As he worked, one small corner of his mind registered the fact that the swishing sound behind him had stopped. But there was no time to consider such matters now, when all his energy—all his will—had to be directed to getting the boat free.
He felt one of the fingernails on his right hand break, but ignored the short, inevitable, stab of pain. He twisted and tugged at the knot, knowing he should he more methodical, yet being unable to discipline himself into adopting a more rational approach. And finally, after what seemed a lifetime, the knot slid apart in his hands.
He put a tentative foot into the boat, and felt it move. But of course it moved! Now that he had untied it, what was there to stop it from moving? He lifted his other leg, lost his balance, and fell clumsily on to the floor of the craft.
Something was digging into his side, and he realized that it must be one of the oars. He picked it up, and poked it blindly into the darkness in the general direction of the landing stage. He felt the oar make contact, and then the prow of the boat swung away from the shore and towards the middle of the Thames.
But the stern stayed where it was!
The boat was tied up at both ends! He should have checked on that before he got in. He awkwardly manoeuvred himself round until he was in the right position to find the second mooring rope. Yes, there it was, and there was the knot holding it.
He wished he had brought a knife with him, so he could have sliced through the rope with one smooth movement. But he hadn’t thought to bring a knife. There were so many things he hadn’t thought to bring. Perhaps that was why he found himself in the position he was in now—because he hadn’t planned ahead, but had relied solely on instinct.
Even as he grappled with the second knot, he could picture his father, watching the whole process and shaking his head in a gesture of censure and despair.
Yes, Father, he thought, I’ve failed again.
Except that this time it wasn’t just the Earl he was letting down—this time it went far, far beyond the bounds of his narrow, censorious family.
The knot finally started to give at the same moment as he heard the violent crash behind him and felt the boat lurch violently. And then, almost before he’d had time to register what was happening, a pair of powerful hands had pinned his arms behind his back, and something cold
and sharp was being drawn across his throat.
He wondered how they had managed to get so close to him without his hearing them. Wondered, too, how he could know he was in pain and yet not really feel hurt. Then he stopped wondering—and everything went black.
Part One: Aldermans Stairs
One
The small crowd had formed almost as soon as the police rowing boat landed. At first it had been all of a huddle, and there was a real danger of the two Wet Bobs being forced down Battle Bridge Stairs and into the river. Then the senior of the two Thames policemen had ordered the mob to step back, and—reluctantly—it had. Now it formed a broad semicircle, so that those people who were at either end were perched perilously on the edge of the wharf, while those in the centre had their backs pressed up against the wall of the nearest warehouse.
From their various vantage points, the individuals who made up the crowd—costermongers who kept one of their eyes on the scene and the other on their barrows, trading company clerks with manifests tucked under their arms, watermen who spent most of the day rowing customers across the river, and the ne’er-do-wells who habitually hung around hoping to earn a dishonest shilling—all strained their necks to get the best view of what was happening.
There wasn’t a great deal to see. The two policemen stood almost like statues, and the sausage-shaped object they’d pulled out of the river was completely shrouded in a tarpaulin.
The sergeant swept his eyes over the restive mob, then leaned towards his partner. ‘I’ll be glad when somebody from Scotland Yard finally gets ’ere,’ he whispered.
‘Yer can say that again,’ the constable agreed.
And almost as if he had been waiting in the wings for his cue, a ‘somebody’ from Scotland Yard did appear. The new arrival was at least a head taller than anyone else on the wharf. He looked around him, assessed the situation, and then—seemingly effortlessly—induced the tightly packed mob to crush together even tighter in order to create a path for him.
A bit like Moses partin’ the Red Sea, thought the sergeant, who had had the Bible—and very little else—thoroughly knocked into him when he was a pupil at the Lant Street board school.
The tall man reached the front of the crowd, and came to a halt in the open space between it and the tarpaulin sausage. It was not just his height that made him stand out, the sergeant realized, although someone nearly six feet tall was a bit of a novelty. The man’s face, too, was striking. The sergeant ran his eyes over it quickly, taking in the details just as he’d been trained to. Bushy eyebrows formed two arches over sharp, penetrating eyes. The nose below them was large and almost a hook. The mouth was wide; the chin solid and square. The impression of Moses had been spot-on—though if the man really had been Jewish it would have been most unlikely he’d have been working for the Met.
The Scotland Yard man looked at the two river policemen in turn. ‘Inspector Blackstone,’ he said crisply.
The sergeant saluted. ‘I’m Sergeant Roberts, sir. An’ this ’ere is Constable Watts.’
The Inspector nodded, as if he had already known that, and was only testing their truthfulness. ‘Are you the ones that found him?’ he asked the sergeant.
‘That’s right, sir,’ Roberts agreed.
‘When and where?’
‘We were on the six o’clock shift,’ Roberts explained. ‘We start out from Wappin’ an’ go up river—’
‘Get to the point,’ Blackstone said—though not unkindly.
‘As we was drawin’ level wiv Battle Bridge Stairs, we saw this thing caught up in the ropes of a barge that was moored in the middle of the river. We didn’t know what it was at first, but as we got closer, we could see it was a body.’ Roberts shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘An’ that’s about it, sir. We pulled ’im on board, rowed to the shore, and ‘ere we are.’
‘Let’s have a look at him then,’ Blackstone said.
The sergeant glanced first at the crowd, and then back at the Inspector. ‘What about all these people, sir?’ he asked.
‘It’s a shame to disappoint them after they’ve waited so long,’ the Inspector told him.
If you’re sure, sir...’ the sergeant said tentatively. Blackstone raised his head and looked into the crowd in such a way that almost every member of it blinked.
‘We’re taking the tarpaulin off now,’ he said in a large, authoritative voice he had not used previously, ‘and if any of you moves so much as an inch forward, I swear I’ll have you. Understand?’
Several heads nodded to indicate belief and acceptance. Satisfied, Blackstone turned back to the sergeant. ‘Let the dog see the rabbit, then.’
The two river policemen knelt down and rolled the corpse out of the tarpaulin. Then, when they’d straightened up again, the Inspector bent down in their place.
Blackstone frowned. ‘This isn’t good,’ he said. ‘This is trouble.’
‘What is, sir?’
‘We’re not looking at one of your average dockland murders here. This man isn’t even a local.’
Roberts ran his eyes over the corpse’s clothes—jacket fraying at the cuffs, trousers that had seen better days, boots scuffed at the toecaps. ‘He’s dressed like a local, sir.’
‘Agreed. But look at his face.’
The sergeant examined the dead man’s features. ‘I see what you mean, sir,’ he admitted.
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Death in Room Five (A Chief Inspector Littlejohn Mystery) Page 25
