Death at Hungerford Stairs

by J C Briggs

  PRAISE FOR

  THE MURDER OF PATIENCE BROOKE:

  CHARLES DICKENS & SUPERINTENDENT JONES INVESTIGATE

  ‘This is a well-written and engaging novel …The pages keep turning, and the evocation of foggy Victorian London is excellent’

  The Historical Novel Society

  ‘[An] aspect of this novel that adds to its enjoyability is the fact that it feels very much like a traditional gaslight mystery, with footsteps in the fog, an unseen person with sinister voice singing a well-known tune … Put all these elements together and it creates just the right amount of suspense’

  5-Star Review, Crime Fiction Lover

  ‘From the first few pages you are captured by this fast paced, descriptively brilliant yarn, which sweeps its reader away into the tangible world of dark, damp, foul-smelling Victorian London’

  5-Star Review, Dickens the Sleuth, Amazon

  For Tom

  ‘Tom was the idol of her life … always to be believed in, and

  done homage to with the whole faith of her heart.’

  David Copperfield

  ‘… he had quite exceptionally bright and active eyes that were always darting about like brilliant birds to pick up all the tiny things of which he made more, perhaps, than any other novelist has done; for he was a sort of poetical Sherlock Holmes.’

  Charles Dickens by G.K. Chesterton

  Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

  Ere the sorrow comes with years? …

  And may well the children weep before you!

  They are weary ere they run;

  They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory

  Which is brighter than the sun.

  They know the grief of man, without its wisdom;

  They sink in man’s despair, without its calm, –

  Are slaves without the liberty in Christdom, –

  Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm, –

  Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly

  The harvest of its memories cannot reap, –

  Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly.

  Let them weep! let them weep!

  From The Cry of the Children by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  CONTENTS

  Praise

  Title

  Dedication

  Quote

  1 Remembering

  2 A Decision

  3 Occy Grave

  4 Rats’ Castle

  5 St Giles’s Churchyard

  6 Poor Robin

  7 Georgie Taylor

  8 The Sea Captain

  9 Hark, Hark, the Dogs do Bark …

  10 The Milliner

  11 Cat’s Hole

  12 Tilly Moon

  13 Mrs Mapes

  14 Fikey Chubb Sweats

  15 Fire

  16 The Morgue

  17 Dens of Vice

  18 Bridie O’Malley’s Tale

  19 Mattie Webb’s Shawl

  20 The House of Quiet

  21 Madame Rigaud

  22 A Face in a Crowd

  23 The Missing

  24 Found

  25 Disguise

  26 Flowers on a Grave

  27 Gallows

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  REMEMBERING

  He remembered the rats. And how they had swarmed in the cellars of the crazy, tumbledown warehouse; sometimes in the grey shadows he had seen hundreds of eyes glittering like little red lamps, and then there would be a skittering of claws as they vanished down holes and into corners. Mary Weller, a servant at his childhood home in Chatham, had scared him half to death with the tale of Chips, a sailor and his talking rat which had gnawed at the seaman’s ship and Chips, too. He had been haunted by them, imagining them curled up on his pillow, nestling in his blankets, darting across his counterpane. When he worked at the blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs, he had hurried up the rotten staircase, trembling, in case they pursued him. He was twelve then, at work, pasting the labels on to the bottles of blacking, twelve hours a day for six shillings a week. He had never forgotten the dark, wainscoted room, the damp, rotting floors, the dirt and decay, and the heave and slap of the river at the walls when the black tide was in.

  Now, Charles Dickens stood outside for the first time in twenty-five years. He had avoided the place as if it were plague-stricken. He could hardly believe it was still standing. The ancient wooden balcony had almost slipped into the thick mud into which his feet were sinking and the poles that had once held up the balcony leaned at drunken angles. The upper storeys tottered over the lower and half the roof had fallen in, though there was still a casement window open in the part that remained. It looked like a wrecked ship, though, he wagered, the rats would not have deserted it. The door had gone but rotting planks had been put in its place. They had been pushed aside to make an entrance. By this, a police constable stood waiting for them.

  Dickens and Superintendent Sam Jones had received the message from Inspector Harker of Scotland Yard. From Bow Street they had hurried along the Strand, turning through the market which stank of rotting fish. A few traders still lingered, but by this time of a late, cold afternoon in November most business had been done, and the boats which had brought the sprats, the herrings and the oysters, packed close in their barrels, had sailed away. The two men had gone down Hungerford Stairs to the bank where the brown river formed scummy pools in the muddy sludge, and from where Brunel’s pedestrian bridge crossed to the south bank. They had not spoken. The message had been about a dead boy found in the old blacking factory. And Dickens and Jones were looking for a boy – a boy gone missing. And a dog. Inspector Harker had known of their search which was why he had sent word. A dog had barked, and a man, alerted by the noise, had gone into the old warehouse where he had found the boy. That was all they knew.

  Superintendent Jones looked at Dickens’s strained face, knowing what he was thinking. He saw his lips moving and knew that he was saying, ‘Let it not be Scrap. Let it not be Poll.’ The same desperate words fluttered on his own lips. Dickens glanced at him as if he had heard them though Sam had not spoken. Each man’s fearful eyes told the same story.

  As they turned at the bottom of the steps, Dickens was face to face with the detested place. He would not have come here were it not for Scrap, the boy they knew. Inspector Harker, thickset and full of purpose, came through the black hole and crossed to meet them.

  ‘The dog,’ said Dickens. His urgency was so intense that he could not even greet the inspector. ‘Is the dog here?’

  ‘No,’ said Inspector Harker. ‘It had disappeared when the man who found the body came out.’

  It could not be Poll then. Poll would not leave Scrap. She would have stayed with him. Dickens thought this, but Sam Jones had to ask.

  ‘Did he say anything about it?’

  ‘Just a dog – a little thing, he said.’ Dickens looked at Sam. Poll was a little dog. He looked along the bank. Was she there? Cowering and afraid. But there was no dog to be seen.

  Inspector Harker followed his gaze and turned back to Sam. ‘I’m sorry. The man heard it barking by the hole there and thought someone might be trapped inside the building – what’s left of it – so he went to have a look. The body is just inside – dumped there, I think.’

  ‘We’ll have a look then. Charles, do you want to stay outside?’ Jones thought it might be too much for him – if it were Scrap, perhaps it was better that he did not see.

  Dickens shook his head. ‘I’ll come.’ He had to go in and see for himself. He could not wait here in the bleak November afternoon. He followed Inspector Harker and the
superintendent, their boots squelching in the ooze. He felt a leaden dread lodged in his stomach. Sam Jones glanced back at him, his grey eyes troubled, but he said nothing.

  They pushed through the old doorway to find themselves standing on wet, sticky earth in the murky light of the old room. The floor had rotted away, but Dickens saw in the gloom that the staircase still went up to the room where he had laboured over his pots of blacking. There was a scuttling on the stairs and an old grey-headed rat, as large as a cat, sat and stared at him as if to say, ‘I know you – what do you do here?’ It was gone in a second, the gristly tail vanishing through a crack.

  Inspector Harker held up his bull’s-eye lamp to show the boy lying face down in the dirt. He was encased in grey mud which had dried, almost set round the corpse as if he were in his coffin already. The face was buried in the mud; you could see how the hair had stiffened into spikes, and how the clothes had crumpled into dried ripples, not fabric but moulded clay. The arms were stretched above the head, the fingers splayed out, sculpted from mud. He did not look real. The impression was that he had been thrown there, so much waste from the river. Flotsam, thought Dickens, a piece of cargo from the wrecked ship. Let it not be Scrap.

  The constable turned him over and the mud flaked away, revealing the thin lad who was real, had been alive, had been a boy, had played with his dog, perhaps, on the oozing shore, had grinned at its antics, had wondered at the passing ships, had dreamed, had longed for something. And now he was dead, here in this place that still smelt of the grave. They stared at the poor, gaunt corpse with its dirty, mud-encrusted face, as yet unrecognisable. Sam’s lips moved – a prayer for the dead. He always did that. His faith was quiet and private yet, whenever a corpse was found, he murmured his prayer, this tall, strong man in the face of whose authority hardened wretches quailed.

  The constable wiped the boy’s face with surprising tenderness, using the handkerchief which the superintendent had handed him for the purpose. Dickens, who did not know that he had been holding his breath, exhaled, and felt as if his heart had restarted. It was not Scrap.

  ‘No,’ said Sam. ‘He is not the boy we are looking for. We’ll leave him to you, but let us know, will you, what you find out. He might belong to someone – someone, somewhere might be waiting for news of their boy.’

  ‘I will,’ said Inspector Harker. ‘It looks as though he might have drowned – see the mud and weed round his mouth. The clothes are dried out, but they look to be stained with water. I wonder if someone found him on the bank, couldn’t be bothered to report it, and just dumped him in here. It happens – too often. Apart from you looking for a boy, I’ve had no reports of another one missing. But then, he might not belong to anyone. The man who found him didn’t know him. There are always boys about, mudlarks, scraping a living here. Who knows?’

  ‘Aye,’ said the superintendent, ‘I know – too many lost boys, and girls, too.’

  Dickens and Jones turned to go. The superintendent began to push his way through the hole. Dickens made to follow but his attention was caught by some chalk markings on the wall.

  ‘Sam, look here.’

  The superintendent backed in again and, raising his lamp, regarded the marks. They formed a picture, the figure of a man, the face of which seemed to be a mask of some sort. He was reminded of a childhood horror – a figure chalked upon a door with a great long mouth and hands like two bunches of carrots. This was not the same at all, but he felt a similar revulsion, remembering how he had run from that figure. The mask here seemed so curiously out of place. Dickens thought there was something sinister about it – what was it doing here, and who had scrawled it? Was it, he wondered, some kind of message connected to the dead boy?

  ‘It might be worth noting this,’ Sam said to Inspector Harker, ‘though of course, it might mean nothing at all.’

  The inspector came over with his lamp. ‘Could be the work of children – the place is not secure, as we have seen. It looks childish. Still, I won’t forget it.’

  Outside, there was a thin wind sneaking along the water. It was nearly dusk; the sun was setting over the river. The sky was a curious green, marbled with red, purple and orange lines like the cover of a book, and the brown river took on a greenish hue like poison. As they stood watching, the colours changed, the marble lines shifted, and the green began to change as the sun sank. The wind created ripples on the river and the colours there broke into splinters, the water darkening and moving restlessly under the sky.

  ‘Ominous sky,’ said Dickens, shivering as the wind reached them, and flecks of rain spat at them. ‘I wonder if that sketch meant anything – it did not seem like a child’s drawing to me – it looked sinister, somehow, deliberate.’

  ‘I know what you mean – if it were the work of a child, one might expect more scrawls, more carelessness in the drawing, but there’s not much we can do about it. The case belongs to Inspector Harker.’

  ‘Poor lad. I wonder if he did drown.’

  ‘Looks like it. It’s not uncommon. These boys and girls, the mudlarks, take risks, go too far out, especially when they see something floating on the surface – might be a piece of wood, a cask, a piece of cloth – something unusual that they might be able to sell, and I have known it before – that the body is dumped somewhere because it’s too much trouble to report it, and if there is no name, no parents, then who cares? Too often, no one.’

  ‘We do – we care about Scrap – and we want him back. What do we do, Sam?’

  ‘I don’t know what we can do. I have Rogers and the other constables on the lookout in the alleys by Crown Street and over Holborn. He can’t have gone too far. Where would he go? And why?’

  ‘Unless he was taken – but, then, what has happened to Poll? He must have gone after her. He would, you know.’

  ‘I know – and when he finds her, I’ll bet he comes back.’

  ‘And if he does not find her?’

  Dickens’s question hovered on the bleak wind which snatched it away, leaving them silent and miserable. There really were no answers to their questions. They would have to possess themselves in patience, and wait, and hope. They turned away to go up the stairs. Dickens looked back at the warehouse rotting into the river. He thought about the lost boy who lay there in the mud. Had he drowned in that terrible water, sucked under by some freak eddy which whirled him to his death? Had he known that it was all over, and that he would never come up again into the light? His heart twisted with pity. What a place. The shadows were lengthening now; that curiously green sky had darkened as the thick clouds gathered like a threat; the cold was biting.

  Superintendent Jones began to ascend with Dickens behind him when a man started to come down, an old white dog at his heels. They waited for him, the steps being narrow and slippery with weed and slime. As he approached, they saw that he looked like a seafaring man with his cap and pea coat, and his red belcher handkerchief round his neck. His hazel eyes were clouded with anxiety as he stopped to look at them.

  ‘Do you know about the boy?’ The question was urgent. ‘I heard a dead boy has been found.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sam. ‘Do you know of a missing boy?’

  ‘I do – my grandson is missing – I came to see – I hope –’ He broke off, uncertain. It was clear he wanted to go and see. The dog looked up at his master, sensing his agitation.

  ‘We are looking for a boy and a dog, but the boy there was not the one we seek. I hope he is not yours,’ said Dickens.

  ‘Thank you, sir. I hope you may find your boy – now I must –’

  On impulse, Dickens handed him his card. There was something about the man which appealed to his sympathy. ‘If you need help, you might wish to come to see me.’

  The man took the card, and without looking at it, pushed it in his pocket. He nodded at them, and went away towards the old factory. The white dog followed closely at his heels. The man stopped and both looked out across the darkening river. They watched as the man squared his shou
lders and then walked towards the black hole where the door had been.

  Dickens and Jones turned to climb the steps which would take them into the passage by two inns, the Old Fox and the Swan. Dickens remembered how he and his fellow worker Bob Fagin would sometimes buy a glass of ale and bread and cheese from the miserable old Swan. He could see now in his mind’s eye, Bob in his ragged apron and paper cap with his hand curled round his glass, the nails encrusted with the blacking, and he remembered scrubbing at his own hands trying to take away the stain. He had thought he would die and be buried in blacking.

  As they passed the inns, a ragged boy, in the act of transferring a heel of grubby bread from hand to mouth, stared at them curiously before turning down a squalid alley where he vanished from sight. Another lost boy. Too many to count but two, at least, were wanted.

  2

  A DECISION

  Dickens and Jones parted on the Strand, the superintendent bound for Bow Street and Dickens turning from Charing Cross to Regent Street, its vast linen-drapery establishments a world away from the rat-infested warehouse. He passed the plate-glass windows dressed with elaborate costumes, rich velvets, glistening silks, lace, golden fringes and tassels, and he could not help but think of the ragged boy with his chunk of dirty bread.

  He crossed Oxford Street and made his way through Cavendish Square where he saw a well-dressed lady walking her dog, a little spaniel which made him think again of Poll, the dog who was lost and Scrap who might have gone to find her – and the Brim family, the children who owned Poll and loved her.

  Mr Brim owned a stationer’s shop; it was there that Dickens had first encountered Scrap, who had helped him pursue the man with the crooked face wanted in connection with a case on which he had worked with Superintendent Jones. Mr Brim had been very ill at the time – still was, though not so bad as then – and Scrap, the street boy, had become his children’s unofficial protector before being promoted to delivery boy, for Mr Brim’s business had flourished from the many customers Dickens had pointed his way. Elizabeth, the superintendent’s wife, had looked after them all and still assisted in the shop when Mr Brim was sick. A most satisfactory outcome for all, Dickens had thought – until Scrap and Poll the dog, had vanished. Where was Scrap? The question had tormented Dickens for three days now; Mr Brim’s children, Eleanor and Tom, were inconsolable and Elizabeth Jones was equally upset. Dickens felt that he must restore all their happiness by finding Scrap and Poll. What he wanted was to appear at the shop door producing Poll from under his coat as he had once produced a guinea pig from a box of bran to delight his children.