Gentlemen Formerly Dressed

by Sulari Gentill

  Rowland shook the writer’s hand firmly. “I will, and with pleasure, Mr. Wells. Thank you, sir.”

  The suite was empty on Rowland’s return. At his request, Claridge’s had not replaced Menzies and so the penthouses were tended by only the usual army of chambermaids.

  As the Australians were now aware that remaining in London beyond a week would become, at the very least, difficult—more probably impossible—they’d decided to split up that morning and cover more ground. Edna had gone to Holloway Prison, to encourage Allie Dawe to keep faith; Milton had set out to see Buchan to ensure that, whatever happened, Allie would have a champion in London. Meanwhile Clyde had headed for Scotland Yard to meet Entwhistle and pose a single question: had the inspector called the Ministry of Health?

  Rowland was certain now that Harcourt had murdered Pierrepont. Yet he knew they would need more than accusations of links to extreme eugenics for the Baron of Harcourt to be considered a more likely suspect than titleless, penniless Allie Dawe who had been discovered with blood literally on her hands.

  Rowland removed his jacket, which had become damp in the cloying fog. He rubbed his face, unsure of what to do next. Harcourt, he now considered the most reprehensible of men, but the lord did seem to love his sister, however twisted that love proved to be. Euphemia, at the mercy of her brothers and now possibly pregnant to one of them, would be utterly destroyed if Lord Harcourt’s motives were exposed. And the future of her unborn child would be bleak indeed. Rowland was reluctant to destroy one innocent woman to save another.

  He took Pierrepont’s head from the Gladstone bag and placed it once again on the sideboard. The waxen face looked accusingly at him, as if it knew what he had almost believed about the man it represented. Rowland groaned as he recalled the same look in Allie Dawe’s eyes when he had asked her if her uncle had been abusing her.

  The telephone rang, and for the first time in weeks he was able to answer it himself without incurring the ire of a butler.

  The reception redirected a call from a Mr. Asquith from the Ministry of Health.

  “Mr. Sinclair, I understand from Inspector Entwhistle that you have been making enquiries with respect to the interest of the Ministry of Health in the death of Alfred Dawe, the Viscount of Pierrepont.”

  “I have,” Rowland replied.

  “I can assure you, Mr. Sinclair, the ministry has very good reason to be involved. Perhaps we could meet and I’ll explain… off the record as it were. Inspector Entwhistle tells me you have become something of a champion for Miss Dawe’s innocence in the matter. I believe I may be able to help you with some hard evidence on that account.”

  “In that case, I would be delighted to meet with you, Mr. Asquith,” Rowland said eagerly. All he had was conjecture at the moment. If Asquith had some sort of proof…

  “Excellent. Can you come now?”

  “Yes… of course… just tell me where.” Rowland scribbled down the name and address of an establishment called The Bitter Pill.

  “Mr. Sinclair,” Asquith added, “you must understand that my speaking to you is somewhat unofficial. Can I ask you to come alone and not speak to anyone of this meeting? I cannot afford to be connected to the leaking of this information.”

  “You have my word, Mr. Asquith,” Rowland agreed.

  He paused to dash off a note to his friends. “A breakthrough—much to tell. Back soon. R.”

  He pulled his jacket back on and grabbed his hat, farewelling Pierrepont’s head with the hope that he would return with some valid corroborating evidence to help the desperate cause of Allie Dawe.

  The club to which Asquith had directed Rowland was a few streets away from The Windmill Theatre, made notorious for its tableaux vivants. With acts titled as “Diana the Huntress”, “The Birth of Venus” and “Nymphs Bathing”, young women were displayed as classical nude statues, thus placating the censors while ensuring the patronage of the tiny but well-appointed theatre.

  The Bitter Pill, in contrast, was a rundown, underground drinking house too decrepit to even qualify as bohemian. Its clientele were a step down from the men happy to pay for the more erudite spectacle of a naked woman pretending to be a naked statue.

  Rowland was neither surprised nor alarmed that Asquith had chosen such an uninviting venue. He had himself taken H.G. Wells to a less than salubrious establishment to ensure they weren’t seen. He assumed that Asquith, too, was wary of being noticed.

  There was something clandestine and anonymous and forgotten about this part of Soho—the crowds were at the Windmill Theatre and here the few passers-by kept their gazes averted and their business to themselves. In the fog, cloaked in coats and hats, every man became any man, undistinguishable and nameless. It was an apt place to pass secrets.

  There were a few patrons at the grimy tables, smoking and drinking cheap wine from thick-walled glasses. They fell silent as Rowland entered, glancing furtively at the gentleman who’d descended into their squalid corner of the world.

  Rowland spotted Asquith, who stood to shake his hand.

  “There’re too many people here,” the civil servant muttered tersely as he fished some coins from the pocket of his long coat and tossed them onto the table, “and if you’ll forgive me saying, Sinclair, you stand out.” He glanced around the tawdry premises nervously. “I know somewhere discreet,” he said quietly. “We’re going to shake hands and say goodbye. I’ll leave; you stay for a drink before you follow. Turn left onto the street at the top of the stairs and keep walking. I’ll be waiting for you at the corner.”

  With that he slapped Rowland on the shoulder and walked out. Rowland ordered a gin but, in truth, could not bring himself to take a sip out of the filthy glass. An ageing prostitute came in touting for business and spoke to him for a while. He let her have his drink, gave her a couple of shillings as he declined her services, and took that opportunity to leave.

  Stepping thankfully out into the chilly day, Rowland turned up his collar and headed left as he had been instructed. The fog made it difficult to see whether Asquith was waiting for him on the corner as he had promised. With his eyes fixed ahead, he didn’t notice the alley much less the men who waited in it. The sack which flew out over his head thrust the world into an immediate, suffocating darkness. A blow to the stomach winded him before he could make a sound and then, the distinctive click of a revolver being cocked and the press of its hard muzzle against his ribs.

  32

  WATERLOO BRIDGE

  TO BE RECONDITIONED

  (Australian Cable Service.)

  LONDON, January 24

  A letter from the Ministry of Transport was read at the London County Council meeting to-day, which stated that the Government had reached conclusions to proceed with the reconditioning of Waterloo Bridge at an estimated cost of £685,000. A grant of 60 per cent of the cost would be made by the Ministry. It was suggested that the question of colouring should be referred to the Fine Arts Commission.

  Cairns Post, 1933

  Rowland blanched at the first onslaught of light, and gasped air as the sack was removed. The floor was cold, stone. The light produced from a single hanging bulb in a windowless room offered enough illumination to make visible an iron staircase which led down from a closed door well above the floor. It was a cellar of some sort.

  Rowland’s eyes adjusted and Asquith came into focus. The civil servant was seated on a chair, watching him. Rowland cursed. With Asquith captured, too, there was no one to raise the alarm.

  It was only when he noticed the revolver in Asquith’s hands that he realised the liaison at The Bitter Pill had been a trap.

  “Don’t move, Sinclair,” Asquith warned as Rowland attempted to stand. “Theo will be back in a moment and he will be displeased if you’ve moved.”

  “Theo? You don’t mean Harcourt? You’re working for Harcourt? My God, man, he’s the most reprehensible kind of pervert!”

  Asquith smiled. A door creaked open at the top of the stairs and Harcourt descend
ed. In one hand he carried several lengths of rope, in the other an Enfield rifle.

  Rowland looked at the two men together. He cursed. Why hadn’t he seen it before? Side by side their resemblance to each other was unmistakable. Asquith was Diogenes Thistlewaite—the other brother of Euphemia Pierrepont, nee Thistlewaite. And then he remembered, the portraits of the Baronets of Asquith among others at Arundel House… the subordinate title after which Diogenes had apparently fashioned his name.

  “What do you want, Harcourt?” Rowland demanded.

  Lord Harcourt regarded him curiously. “Odd tone for a man in your position to adopt. But then we didn’t send our best and brightest to the penal colonies, did we? The breeding stock was arguably inferior in terms of intellect in the first place.”

  “At least our sisters were safe,” Rowland spat.

  Harcourt laughed. “Your horror is based in ignorance and twisted cultural norms, not science, Sinclair. If you were a man of science you would not be able to deny the argument for concentrating genetic success.”

  “Is that why you killed Pierrepont… in some warped act of genetic purification?”

  Harcourt’s face darkened. “Pierrepont reneged on our arrangement. When he discovered how special Euphemia’s child would be, the fool said he would have no part of it. He wanted the marriage annulled. The closed-minded fool planned to denounce us and to ruin our sister.”

  Rowland decided to play his hand, weak as it was. “When this comes out, Harcourt, whatever the scientific justification, your sister will be ruined and her child a pariah. The only way to prevent that is to confess to the murder now.”

  “It’s not going to come out, Sinclair,” Asquith replied quite casually. “We’re going to kill you.”

  “You were the last person seen with me, Asquith,” Rowland said, sliding back as the gun was raised in his direction. “They’ll work it out.”

  “Not in the condition they find your body,” Harcourt said coldly. He trained the rifle on Rowland. “Tie him up, Diogenes,” he instructed his brother. “We’ve only a few hours till dark.”

  Asquith bound Rowland hand and foot, then, dragging him to the base of the iron stairs, they secured him to that too, brutally subduing any resistance with their fists.

  Rowland tried to reason with the brothers, but they only laughed as if they were part of some great joke to which Rowland was not privy.

  The panic rose in Rowland’s chest and with it fury. He swore at Harcourt and Asquith, calling them vile, inbred degenerates among other things less accurate but more profane.

  Asquith kicked him until he couldn’t speak anymore. Harcourt watched and when his brother was done, put down the rifle, removed Rowland’s tie and used that to gag him.

  It was quite late in the afternoon before Rowland’s companions thought to worry about him. They had returned to find his note, which had promised he would return soon. In the first hours they simply assumed he was pursuing whatever breakthrough he had made in Allie’s case. The sun penetrated the fog and the brightness of the day provided a kind of reassurance. Rowland was, after all, a grown man so they were initially more anxious to know what he had found than where he was.

  As they waited they talked of Clyde’s discovery that Entwhistle had not, in fact, telephoned the Ministry of Health making Asquith’s presence at Watts difficult to explain, unless he’d had some independent knowledge of Pierrepont’s murder.

  The daylight started to fade. Milton began to pace.

  At five o’clock they reread and scrutinised Rowland’s note more carefully—as if they could extract more information simply by reading it over and over again.

  Milton squinted at the note under the concentrated light of a lamp. “Clyde, do you have on hand one of those art pencils you and Rowly use?”

  Clyde tossed him the pencil. Milton placed the note onto the table and rubbed the flat of the lead over it. An impression became visible. Rowland’s writing. “The Bitter Pill, Soho.”

  “What’s that?” Edna asked, peering over the poet’s shoulder.

  “It’s a rubbing of what was written on the page before.” Milton murmured. “This must be where Rowly went.”

  “Why would he go to Soho?” Edna asked, already donning her gloves and looking for her hat.

  Clyde grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair. “Let’s go.”

  They took a motor taxi to Soho and alighted just outside the dissolute establishment whose name had been inadvertently impressed onto Rowland’s note.

  If Rowland had turned the odd head when he’d entered the bar, the three of them turned several more. A few drunken men called out to Edna. Clyde and Milton kept her protectively between them. They spoke to the establishment’s dishevelled proprietor, describing Rowland.

  The man was vague… he might have seen a tall man with dark hair and blue eyes but he didn’t really pay that much attention to the punters. It was the woman who confirmed that Rowland had been there—a middle-aged prostitute who had been moved by the young man’s manners, the courtesy with which he had spoken to her.

  “That’s Rowly,” Milton declared. “He’d be polite to the devil himself!”

  Edna swatted the poet as the prostitute reared in affront. “Do you know where he went?” Edna asked after apologising for Milton. “We’re quite worried about him.”

  The prostitute looked a little sheepish. “I run out after him… I don’t run after men, mind you, but the kind gentleman gave me five shillings. I thought he might have expected something fer that, if you know what I mean?” She took them up the stairs to the threshold of The Bitter Pill and pointed up the street. “He walked up there and then he disappeared into that alley. I figured then maybe he’d already arranged something… you know.”

  They had started towards the alley before she finished. Edna thanked the woman over her shoulder as she trotted to keep up with the long strides of the men.

  Dark and dank, the alley ran behind a number of less prosperous businesses. They searched for any sign that Rowland had been there.

  “Clyde, have you a light?” Milton asked, crouching by the rough brick wall of the building on one side of the alleyway.

  Clyde flicked open his lighter and held it up to the wall. A fresh white mark—like chalk.

  “Ed, could this be plaster?”

  Edna nodded. She bit her lip.

  “We’d better call Wilfred,” Clyde said grimly.

  Rowland tensed as the door creaked open again and the bulb was flicked on. He was almost relieved, though he knew it meant his time had run out. Every muscle ached from the strain of the position in which he’d been secured. His left wrist was rubbed raw with his attempts to get out of the bonds, and against the cold stone floor his body had become chilled to the core.

  Asquith and Harcourt ignored him for a while, sitting together companionably and sharing an apple. Asquith peeled the fruit with the gleaming blade of a hunting knife, before cutting segments. They talked of their sister, the progress of her pregnancy and their plans for her child. They discussed genetics, eugenic theories and their own extreme position which, it seemed, they were testing with Euphemia.

  When the apple was consumed, Asquith wiped the knife and held it up to the light. He glanced at Rowland. Harcourt picked up the gun.

  Instinctively, Rowland strained against the ropes as they stood.

  Harcourt placed the gun against Rowland’s temple and hushed him, as you would a child. “Sssshhh, it’s all right. Don’t move now, there’s a good man.”

  Rowland froze, repulsed. The revolver’s muzzle slipped on the cold sweat which had broken out on his forehead. Harcourt adjusted it, still hushing and crooning.

  Asquith squatted over him with the hunting knife. Did they intend to murder him together? Or was Harcourt merely holding him still for his brother’s strike? Pierrepont flashed into Rowland’s mind… Was this how the viscount was killed: held under gunpoint until the blade was plunged?

  Asquith cut the binding
s on Rowland’s ankles. “Get up,” he said.

  Rowland gasped into the gag.

  Harcourt kept the gun trained on him but pulled it back so Rowland could struggle painfully to his feet.

  Asquith sheathed his knife in a scabbard on his belt and took another gun from his pocket.

  “Very well, Sinclair, we’d best get on. Theo is sitting at the House of Lords tomorrow morning—we don’t want to be out too late.”

  Harcourt grabbed Rowland’s collar, pressed the gun against his spine and shoved him up the stairs.

  The cellar sat beneath a disused printing shop, which Rowland concluded—by virtue of Harcourt’s possession of the keys—somehow belonged to the aristocrat.

  A Vauxhall Cadet was parked in a narrow laneway behind the premise. It was dark now, as well as foggy. Rowland had no idea whether the fog had returned or simply not dissipated throughout the day.

  As they approached the vehicle, Rowland made out another car parked at the end of the lane but close enough that he could see it was packed tightly with men. A prostitute peered into its window, plying her illicit trade to the car full of potential customers.

  Before he could signal them for help, Asquith pushed him, still gagged and with his hands bound, onto the floor in the back of the Cadet. Harcourt sat in the back seat with the gun pointed at Rowland’s head. Again the lord hushed and soothed as though he were calming a skittish filly.

  Asquith slipped behind the wheel and started the engine.

  On the floor, Rowland weighed his increasingly limited options. His panic seemed to have abated with the first reprieve, when Asquith had cut his bonds rather than stabbing him. Rowland was thinking more clearly now. He assumed the brothers were taking him out of London—to some rural manor—in order to shoot him and dispose quietly of his body. There would be his best chance. They had guns, but there were only two of them. Slowly but constantly, he rubbed his right wrist against the ropes. If he could wear the plaster back, the bonds might loosen enough to allow him to work free his hands. Aside from that, he could only hope the men in the other car had realised he was being abducted, and were not themselves doing something so unlawful that they dare not alert the police.