The Blue and the Grey

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Where does Tanner expect you to publish this story, Batchelor?’ Buckley wanted to know. ‘The Telegraph won’t touch it.’

  ‘Neither will The Times,’ Dyer said. ‘No respectable paper will.’

  ‘Who said anything about respectable?’ Batchelor smiled. ‘Gabriel?’

  The old man downed a good sized brandy in one go. ‘The Ebullient’s your best bet. Georgie Lewes is no stranger to libel actions, and if he knows TLH has turned a story down, he’ll print it out of spite. It can’t be easy, having all those children running about with the TLH chin; a man has to take his revenge where he can.’

  ‘Collaboration then, Gabriel?’ Batchelor said. ‘My exquisite writing style with your nose for smut?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘There’s a drink in it for you. Inspector Tanner’s paying.’

  ‘Is he now?’ Horner chuckled. ‘Make mine a triple, then. Now, to business … See him over there?’

  The offices of the Ebullient stood at the dingy end of Fleet Street where the open sewer that was the Fleet River now bubbled with its noxious odours feet below the pavement. Here, long ago, had stood the Bridewell, the London prison where ghouls on a diet of bread and water had thrust their scrawny arms through the bars, clawing the air as they begged for charity from passers-by.

  A locomotive clanked and hissed as it rattled over the viaduct, and the horses at Ludgate whinnied and stamped. All around this end of the street, the new and the old struggled to survive side by side.

  Struggling to survive, too, was Georgie Lewes. He had a magnificent set of Piccadilly weepers which offset his long hair, but these days he’d taken to wearing a smoking cap to disguise the baldness on the top of his head. Lewes was between posts, ever the position of a journalist, and he had left the radical Leader to disappear without trace. The philosophical Fortnightly Review was whirring in his brain that morning, but meanwhile, until he took over the running of it, a man had to eat. And that he could do so was thanks to the Ebullient.

  It had to be said that Georgie Lewes was no stranger to scandal. If his Agnes had borne children with Leigh Hunt’s chin, more than one paramour had done likewise with the Lewes lip, which jutted defiantly at James Batchelor that morning.

  ‘You’re joking, of course,’ he said, looking the reporter up and down.

  ‘Emphatically not.’ Batchelor sat opposite the man.

  Lewes adjusted his pince-nez. ‘Let me see if I understand you. You are a freelance journalist hoping to make his way in the literary world, and you offer me an exposé of—’ his eyes widened – ‘several prominent men who have been seen in the company of ladies of low morals.’

  ‘In a nutshell,’ Batchelor said, beaming.

  ‘You are doubtless unfamiliar with the laws of libel.’ Lewes sat back and folded his arms.

  ‘Leigh Hunt said you’d say that.’

  This time Lewes’ pince-nez fell off the bridge of his nose. ‘You know Leigh Hunt?’

  ‘Intimately,’ Batchelor said with a smile. ‘I offered him this and he said he, regrettably, had to decline. But that you and the Ebullient would lap it up.’

  ‘Did he now?’ Lewes’ mind was racing. ‘To what end, Mr Batchelor?’

  ‘To the end, sir, of catching the Haymarket Strangler.’

  ‘The Strangler?’ Lewes was all ears. Philosophical debate among the literati was one thing, but nothing sold papers like horrible murder. The more horrible the better. ‘How?’

  ‘Tell me, Mr Lewes,’ Batchelor said, crossing one nonchalant leg over another, ‘are you a student of nature?’

  ‘Passingly,’ Lewes said.

  ‘Consider an ant’s nest,’ Batchelor suggested. ‘Poke it with a stick. What happens?’

  ‘Er … they run around, panicking.’

  ‘Precisely. And while they’re panicking, for the briefest of moments, their eggs are unguarded, their young defenceless.’

  ‘They are,’ Lewes concurred.

  ‘There you have it. Print that in the Ebullient and the gentlemen concerned will run around like headless chickens – if I am not confusing nature there – and, with any luck, the murderer will be exposed.’

  Lewes was still wrestling silently with the ethics of it all.

  ‘If the Strangler’s not one of the names in my article,’ Batchelor said, ‘these men have at least all walked past him. They have drunk with him. Shared, perhaps, the charms of the very women he went on to slaughter.’

  ‘Is that line in here, Mr Batchelor?’ Lewes asked.

  ‘No,’ Batchelor said, then leaned forward. ‘But it could be.’ He looked at the Ebullient’s editor and knew that he had him.

  ‘There’ll have to be a few asterisks,’ Lewes warned. ‘The Ebullient isn’t made of money. And, of course, if the Strangler is caught, we get sole editorial.’

  ‘Don’t you mean when he’s caught, Mr Lewes?’

  For nights now Richard Tanner had been burning the midnight oil trying to piece together the last moments of the life of William Whicker, also known as Winthrop. He knew perfectly well that the man had been killed by his own ambition. He was streetwise and plausible, but trying his own brand of sleight-of-hand in a foreign country in the middle of a war would have been beyond him. Tanner had written to Allan Pinkerton, the Glasgow ex-copper who had failed to protect Lincoln, as all his people had, but he didn’t hope for much information from that source.

  Peg Whicker had not known precisely where her husband had been, but the letter on Tanner’s desk, the one she had passed to him, was postmarked Washington. Whicker had been staying, already using the name Winthrop, at Room Fifty-Eight of the Kimmel House Hotel, and he wrote that he was annoyed by the behaviour of George. ‘The man drinks, Peg, like we all do, but he can’t hold his liquor. He knows his way across the Potomac, though, and has never been arrested, so I need him.’

  Who, Tanner wondered for the umpteenth time, was George, and what was the reference to the Potomac? It was a river; Tanner knew that much. Then, a thought struck him. There was one man, right here in London, who may be able to shed light on this riddle. The man who had expressed such an interest in the passengers on the Orient in the first place. Matthew Grand.

  ‘What say we help each other with our enquiries, Mr Grand?’

  Matthew Grand had been summoned peremptorily to Vine Street by a couple of boys in blue quite early that morning. At least this time he hadn’t been dragged there. Neither, bearing in mind his first meeting with the Baker boys, had it been at gunpoint. Speaking of which, he had been careful to leave his thumb-breaker back at the Cavendish.

  ‘Does the Kimmel House Hotel, Washington, mean anything to you, Mr Grand?’

  ‘It does,’ Grand said, gritting his teeth as he took a sip of Tanner’s tea. ‘Most folks call it the Pennsylvania House. It’s on the south side of C Street, if memory serves, between Fourth and Fifth Streets. Why?’

  ‘Mr Winthrop stayed there,’ Tanner told him. ‘Prior to boarding the Orient.’

  ‘How did you find that out?’ Grand asked.

  The inspector waved Winthrop’s letter in front of him. ‘Why would a man not be arrested,’ he asked, ‘for knowing his way across the Potomac?’

  Grand frowned. ‘The Potomac is the river that divides the North from the South,’ he said. ‘The Blue from the Grey. Can I see that?’

  Tanner passed the paper across.

  ‘The only kind of man who would have been crossing the Potomac over the last few years would be a Confederate or a Yankee spy, Inspector, depending on the direction.’

  ‘Would such a man have carried money? Gold, for instance?’

  ‘Sure. Who had you in mind?’

  ‘I think I should tell you, Mr Grand, that the late Mr Winthrop was actually William Whicker. He was a confidence trickster with an arrest sheet as long as your arm. I believe that was why he was in America, and it’s probably why he died.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Grand sat bolt upright. ‘This reference here – Geor
ge not holding his liquor.’

  ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘It might,’ Grand said.

  Tanner sat upright too, then leaned towards his man. ‘Isn’t it about time you came clean with me, Mr Grand?’ he said. ‘You’re no more chasing Charles Dundreary over a card game than I am. What’s really going on?’

  Matthew Grand never knew, to his dying day, why he suddenly changed his mind about Richard Tanner. That morning he had trusted him about as far as he trusted John Wilkes Booth or the Great Maskelyne. But now, suddenly, he saw a converging of the ways, that Tanner’s path and his might not be so very different after all.

  ‘I should throw my badge on your desk,’ Grand said. ‘Except that I don’t have one. I work for Lafayette Baker of the National Detective Police in Washington.’

  ‘The National …?’

  ‘It’s a secret police service,’ Grand explained. ‘Run by Secretary of War Stanton since ’sixty-two. Baker runs it within the War Department and reports directly to him.’

  ‘So you’re a copper, too?’ Tanner was almost smiling.

  ‘Of sorts,’ Grand said. ‘But it’s not that simple. I’m chasing the son of a bitch who helped Booth get away at Ford’s Theatre. I owe him a bump on the head.’

  ‘Mr Dundreary.’ Tanner nodded. ‘Does the letter help?’

  ‘If I remember the New York Tribune article I got hold of the other day in Fleet Street, it said that the conspirator detailed to kill Vice President Johnson was staying at the Pennsylvania Hotel. His name is George Atzerodt.’

  ‘The George who can’t hold his liquor,’ Tanner said.

  ‘According to the Tribune, Azterodt lost his nerve on Good Friday and got liquored up at the Kirkwood House. When the balloon went up at Ford’s that evening, he got the Hell out.’

  ‘Did the Tribune … do you know anything about this man?’

  ‘Some of it came out at the conspirators’ trial. Atzerodt had been spying across the Potomac – I guess that’s how your man Whicker knew him – throughout the war. He must have known Booth and some or all of the others.’

  ‘Including Dundreary,’ Tanner chipped in.

  ‘It’s my guess your man panicked,’ Grand said. ‘Got out of Washington – and the country – as soon as he could.’

  ‘That’s my guess too,’ the inspector said. ‘Bill was never one for guns and violence. He’d have been terrified.’

  ‘But Dundreary panicked too.’ Grand was reasoning it out. ‘And he needed to leave just as fast – faster, in case I should recognize him again.’

  ‘And it was just Will Whicker’s bad luck that the two of them ended up on the same ship.’

  ‘Well.’ Grand passed the letter back to Tanner. ‘Now we know the why. All we got to work out now is the who.’

  The great lion over the entrance to Northumberland House looked down on the people of London as they scurried and swarmed like ants around Nelson’s column. Two of the ants that morning were James Batchelor and Matthew Grand, and they were walking east along the Strand.

  ‘Tell me about this place,’ the American said.

  ‘It’s like everywhere else in London,’ Batchelor told him. ‘Heaven and Hell cheek by jowl. There used to be a menagerie over there when I was a kid – I saw my first bear there. Mind you, it had seen better days; its fur looked like something out of a mattress. On this side used to be old John of Gaunt’s palace, but the peasants burned it down in their Revolt.’ Batchelor looked at his companion. ‘That was in 1381, by the way, when Gabriel Horner was a cub reporter.’ Both men laughed. ‘And here is Alsatia.’

  ‘Alsatia?’ Grand stood still.

  ‘Named after Alsace, between France and Germany, a kind of no man’s land along the Rhine. Technically, the police can’t arrest a man here because it belongs to the Duchy of Lancaster.’

  ‘Can’t arrest a man, huh?’ Grand murmured. ‘That could be useful.’

  ‘Useful …’ Batchelor repeated. ‘Why?’

  But Grand was already striding towards the river where the ramshackle houses jostled each other in their urban quest for the sky. Batchelor scurried after him and watched the American turn into a blind alley, then climb some steps to a large, brass-studded door. Batchelor had no idea this house was here. It was four storeyed, Georgian and looked out over the Adelphi and the great, brown artery that was the Thames.

  ‘Useful—’ Grand slotted a key into a lock and opened the door – ‘because I have taken rooms here.’

  ‘Have you?’ Batchelor was impressed. Alsatia it may have been, but all London property cost the earth, even Fleet Lane, the home of the redoubtable Mrs Biggs. ‘Which floor?’

  ‘All of them,’ Grand said, leaving Batchelor open-mouthed in the vestibule.

  ‘What was wrong with the Cavendish?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Grand said, sweeping up the staircase. ‘Except that it’s a hotel, and in my experience, they’re too darned wide open. Flunkeys everywhere, listening in barrooms and hovering at tables. My God—’ he stopped on a half-landing – ‘listen to me. I’d never have thought like this before Ford’s Theatre.’

  ‘Yes,’ Batchelor said with a nod. ‘Murder will do that to people. Every time I wander west of Temple Bar I find myself looking at faces, wondering …’

  ‘I’m having my things sent over later today,’ Grand said, ushering the journalist into a vast drawing room. A portrait of Victoria and Albert looked benignly down from above the fireplace. ‘That’ll have to go,’ he said.

  ‘Wise choice,’ Batchelor murmured.

  ‘Well, I just wanted you to see my new place, James,’ Grand said. ‘What’s your line on servants?’

  ‘They listen in barrooms and hover at tables, Matthew,’ Batchelor reminded him. ‘You said it yourself.’

  ‘Good call,’ Grand said, nodding. ‘I cooked for myself in the Wilderness. I guess I can do it now. Cup of tea?’ He said the words as though he was chewing a wasp.

  ‘Thank you, no. I have to see S … someone. Nice place, though, nice place. I’m sure you’ll be very happy.’

  ‘I’m not very happy, Mr Batchelor.’ Mrs Biggs was standing there on her front porch with a metaphorical rolling pin in her hand.

  ‘Why ever not, Mrs B?’ The eternal lodger tried the familiar title, if only for old times’ sake.

  ‘I had occasion to visit the offices of the Telegraph this morning.’

  ‘You did?’ Batchelor could see the way this conversation was about to go.

  ‘Now old Mr Kitchen has passed away, I needed to advertise his room. I got talking to a clerk there, a clerk who knows you well.’

  ‘Clerks, eh!’ Batchelor clicked his tongue. ‘Can’t believe a word they say, in my experience.’

  ‘And in my experience, Mr Batchelor, you are out of work, aren’t you?’

  ‘What? No, I—’

  ‘The clerk told me you had been given your marching orders. “Chucked out”, that was the phrase he used. Not very journalistic, I don’t suppose, but accurate.’

  If truth be told, James Batchelor was less fond of his landlady than had once been the case. He was now more aware of her narrow eyes, her ill-fitting dentures and the falsity of her hair colouring.

  ‘I am freelance, Mrs Biggs,’ he told her, ‘writing not merely for the Telegraph but for others.’

  ‘That’s as maybe—’ she folded her arms – ‘but freelance work brings freelance wages – intermittent, shall we say. And the whole point about rent is that it is regular. You see how the two things don’t add up?’

  Batchelor could.

  ‘So—’ Mrs Biggs took a deep breath – ‘in the light of my discoveries, I must ask you to leave forthwith.’

  ‘Forth …?’

  ‘With. Now.’ She looked levelly at him. ‘You may clear your room, of course, but if I see you here after three o’clock, I shall be obliged to call a policeman.’

  The bottom had suddenly fallen out of James Batchelor’s world. He had no job, no roo
f over his head. And he had a murderer to catch. Never mind – there was still George Sala, and he would see him right.

  ‘Is that it?’ Sala asked, blinking in the early evening sun. ‘Matthew Grand is chasing a conspirator he ran into outside Ford’s Theatre?’

  ‘Well, yes …’ Batchelor was checking the street, north and south. If Sala refused to meet him in one of London’s parks, and the Telegraph offices were out of the question, an ordinary street it would have to be. This one was Whitehall, where the government’s offices rose grandly to the sky and the smell of horse shit floated like a miasma from the Horse Guards’ barracks.

  ‘Dammit, man, I knew all that before I left Washington. What I am looking for is any evidence that Grand is a conspirator himself. Has he met anyone in a low dive? Sent any telegrams you’ve intercepted? Been anywhere near the American embassy? Is he trying to spend Confederate dollars? Any careless slips about the good ol’ boys or reminiscences of Jeff Davis? Good God, Batchelor, I chose you for this work because I thought you were a journalist. Had a newshound’s nose for the truth. Instead, what do I find? An idiot! Well, that’s it,’ Sala said, adjusting the cane in his hand. ‘I’ll have to find another way. Here.’ He slipped the man an envelope from his inside coat pocket. ‘And that’s the last. Newshound, indeed. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off for a night at the Haymarket.’

  James Batchelor trudged east again. He walked across the decaying frontage of Northumberland House, and ragged urchins ran at his heels.

  ‘Spare a copper, guv’nor.’

  ‘Come on, guv’nor, I ain’t ate today.’

  ‘Neither have I,’ he grunted, but he threw them sixpence if only to avoid tripping over them. Now he had no job, no rooms and no George Sala. And he suddenly found himself, complete with a depressingly small bag in which were his entire possessions, in Alsatia, by the Adelphi, where the steps went down to the river. Near the new rooms of Matthew Grand.

  SEVENTEEN

  James Batchelor didn’t remember going to bed that night. He had a very vague recollection of a cheery fire, of rather good brandy, of chops being sent in from the Cavendish, but the details were hazy. He lay very still, wondering where in the world he might be. He carefully extended a hand to the right, to the left, and didn’t encounter the edge of the bed. Not Mrs Biggs’ therefore; her beds were as mean and narrow as the landlady’s mind itself. Then he investigated the bedclothes covering him; smooth, soft and warm. It was confirmation, if confirmation was needed, that he was not back in his room; his coarse blanket had no connection with this down-filled coverlet. He then became aware of something else, and this was completely incomprehensible. He was wearing a silk bed-gown, but so roomy that it could only belong to … and he remembered. He was at Matthew Grand’s new rooms in Alsatia. He let his head sink into the feather pillows, and he breathed a sigh of relief as everything suddenly came flooding back. He was not just in Matthew Grand’s new rooms. He was in his new room – he had been invited to stay and had gratefully accepted.