Trapping Fog

by William Stafford

  “Er-”

  And then her expression changed. She looked at my hand and turned it over. Puzzled bewilderment clouded her boat, like she recognised something and she didn’t like it. She shoved my hand away and got to her feet, knocking her chair over.

  She proceeded to scream the place down.

  I did my best to shush her but she kept screaming and backing away, and the copper came in, bringing the bushy-bearded sergeant with him and they grabbed me by the arms. So rough they was I thought they was going to have my chalks right off - as if I was the one causing the commotion.

  “That’s not my husband!” the woman kept screaming.

  They bundled me out of there sharpish and bunged me back in the cell.

  “You can wait in here until we find out what to do with you,” said Bushy-Beard.

  The other copper rolled his eyes at me and he says, well, he says, if you ain’t Damien Deacus and you ain’t Jedidiah Plank, who the bleedin’ hell are you?

  And he goes, giving the door a slam.

  Actually, I could have said, I’m a bit of both.

  Eighteen

  Kipper found Bow Street nick overrun with men from Scotland Yard. Like an infestation of vermin, he sneered. Vermin that won’t stop talking to me.

  That rat, Bigby, clapped his arm around Kipper’s shoulder in greeting. It was becoming a habit almost as nauseating as his perpetual pipe-smoking.

  “Johnny!” Bigby cried as if reunited with a long-lost friend. “Hope you don’t mind us moving in like this.”

  “Moving in?” Kipper’s jaw dropped like a broken drawbridge.

  “Making here the base of our operations.”

  “Scotland Yard burn down, did it?” A note of hope ignited Kipper’s eyes.

  “Here is more convenient,” said Bigby. “We don’t mind roughing it. And, if all goes to plan, we shall be out of your hair before you can say Jack Robinson.”

  “Who?”

  “Idiomatic expression. Don’t worry about it.”

  “‘Plan’?”

  “We haven’t just stopped by for tea and crumpets, old boy - speaking of which...”

  A cheer went up as Sergeant Adams elbowed his way in, bearing a tea tray that rattled with cups and saucers.

  “Good man, your sergeant,” Bigby nudged Kipper. “I’ve half a mind to poach him.”

  You can boil him in oil for all I care, Kipper glowered in Adams’s direction. The traitor!

  Bigby accepted a cup of tea with a gracious nod. “What’s this? No crumpets?”

  “Only muffins, I’m afraid, sir,” Sergeant Adams looked bashful. “I could send Constable Harding-”

  “No, no need,” Bigby took up a buttered muffin and bit into it with gusto. “Lovely.”

  “Sir?” Adams offered the tray to Kipper.

  “Good god, no. This is a place of work not the bleedin’ Savoy.”

  Downcast, Adams shuffled away.

  “Right,” said Kipper. “You had better tell me what you and your tea-swilling, muffin munchers are doing in my nick.”

  Bigby smirked, amused. “Muffin munchers! I like that. Makes us sound like a load of lesbians.”

  “Who?” said Kipper. “No!” he stamped his foot. “Tell me what you’re doing or bugger off out of it.”

  Bigby laughed and rested a buttock on the edge of a desk. “Pooling resources, old boy. Putting our heads together. Many hands make light work and all of that, what!”

  Kipper frowned, none the wiser.

  “Two heads, better than one? No? Never heard that one either? Honestly, Johnny: we could use your acuity on this one.”

  “Me what?”

  “Your finely-tuned copper’s instinct. This place is handy for our sting, to be sure, but it also has the additional benefit of having you here, Inspector John Kipper. Your name carries a lot of weight.”

  “Does it?”

  “Oh, yes! I’ll say!”

  Kipper stood up straight. Well, I never! He coughed, embarrassed. “Hang about!” he cleared his throat. “You said something about a sting?”

  Bigby marvelled. “There it is! Mind like a steel trap. We’re going undercover, Johnny, setting a snare for old Foggy Jack, lure him out into the open and then –” He clapped his hands right in front of Kipper’s nose, “We’ve got the fiend!”

  Kipper, blushing to have been so startled, backed off a little. “Fiend? That’s a bit...”

  “Is it? I was going to go with ‘bastard’ but no, I think ‘fiend’ is better. Now, let me tell you what we have in mind.”

  Nineteen

  It looked like I was going to be there for the night. Doctor Hoo’s plan, as far as I could tell was to get me sprung from the nick by having Plank’s Mrs tell the coppers they’d got the wrong man. Well, it wasn’t going too well so far, was it?

  I stretched out on the bunk again, wrapping the rough blanket around me and tried not to feel sorry for myself.

  I can tell you that cell didn’t get no more comfortable or inviting the longer I spent in it but, somehow, despite my thoughts racing each other to the front of my mind, I found myself drifting off to sleep. You know how it is when your thinking blends in with your dreams until you don’t know what’s what no more.

  Well, I was thinking about Doctor Hoo and how his plan to get me out of there by having Plank’s Mrs tell ’em I wasn’t who they thought I was, and what he’d try next to get me out of there, and I was kicking myself for being a bloody fool for not trusting the doctor in the first place and how could I thought for one second that he was turning me in to the rozzers. And I remembered trying to climb out of the window with me new chalks letting me down and then - them eyes! That pair of minces looking in at me and laughing and-

  Blow me, if they weren’t there again!

  There in the dark, in my cell, what had, I remind you, a bleedin’ locked door!

  I sat up on my bunk and rubbed my eyes but they was still there, staring at me. I held the blanket, clinging to it like it would shield me from this horror. My skin was crawling, tingling with a childlike terror I hadn’t felt since I was a nipper.

  It was a dream. It had to be.

  “Piss off,” I told my visitor. It didn’t piss off. It laughed. It stayed where it bleedin’ was and laughed. I got more annoyed with it than scared, to be honest.

  “Who are you?” It seemed reasonable to arsk. “And how did you get in here?”

  The shadows moved and, as well as the eyes, I could make out the size and the shape of my uninvited guest. It couldn’t have been no more than a yard or so in height. A child, then. Or a midget. Either way: too big to get in through the bleedin’ keyhole.

  “Hello, Damien,” says the midget-child in a high voice but I can’t tell if it’s Benny or Jenny.

  “Here!” I objected. “How’d you know my name?”

  “It’s written on the door,” laughed the little titch. “But I’ve been watching you for a long time.”

  “Oh, yes?” I was glad of the darkness; it hid my blushes. “Even earlier on when I availed myself of the bucket?”

  “Long before then,” said the tiddler. “You’re quite a character.”

  “Oh, am I indeed? Well, if you’re going to come in here, calling me that, and spying on me private moments, don’t you think you ought to introduce yourself?”

  “I am doing,” said the short-arse. “Call me Sprite.”

  “Funny name.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not disappointed. I mean it’s not like I thought you was, for example, the Ghost with the Christmas Present or nothing like that. Now, are you going to piss off like I told you or tell me what the bleedin’ hell you want?”

  I felt I could speak so boldly to this Sprite
figure an account of it being nothing but a dream, brung about by me having had no supper. I ought to complain about that, I had.

  “Both,” said Sprite, “but not in that order. Your employer.”

  “Who?”

  “Exactly. He is a remarkable man.”

  “That’s one way to describe him.”

  “I have need of his services.”

  “What? D’you need a new pair of chalks and all? Perhaps he’s still got me old ones knocking around.”

  “No, no. Not those services.”

  “What then?”

  “Not now, not yet.”

  “When then?”

  “Ssh!” He or she (I don’t bleedin’ know) pressed a dirty finger to my lips. It didn’t half pong and I dreaded to think where it might have been. “You don’t need to know.”

  I shrank back and wiped the back of my hand across my cakehole and then spat on the floor for good measure. “Then why come here? Why tell me anything at all?”

  But the Sprite thing was gone. Just vanished. I looked under my blanket and even in the bucket to make sure.

  There was fat chance of sleep after that. I lay awake until the morning, trying to work out if I’d woken up before the visit or after.

  Twenty

  Kipper waited in the fog. He wondered if the ‘fiend’ was waiting too. Perhaps he was close, perhaps waiting and watching too. The lights of the public house on the corner glowed a dim yellow and the murk muffled the sounds of the last straggling drinkers. The heels of a woman’s shoes clicked and clattered on the cobblestones. The wearer was negotiating prices with her client: a tanner in the hand or a bob in the mouth. The client was silent; Kipper supposed it must be a gentleman who did not wish to be overheard discussing such ungentlemanly things in the squalid Whitechapel streets.

  Kipper found himself holding his breath until the pair had passed by to conduct their transaction in some other alley. Perhaps it would be over quickly and the dollymop would come back this way on her Molly, hoping to pick up one last punter as the pub closed its doors.

  Out of the gloom came another figure, along with the odour of cheap lavender water. Kipper pressed his back against the wall, heedless of the damp seeping through his coat. The last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself by having to fend off a grubby business proposition. His heart pounded like galloping hooves against his ribs. He continued to hold his breath and his fingers tightened their grip on the police-issue revolver in his pocket. He hadn’t wanted it, had never fired one, but Bigby had insisted. Even the sight of it, he’d told Kipper, might give our fiend pause and that might be enough for us to nab him. Kipper didn’t share Bigby’s confidence that things would be as cut and dried as all that but it was comforting, he would admit, to have the firearm in his possession. Just in case.

  The perfumed figure was a tall woman in a tattered red shawl. Her hair was piled high above a pale and painted face. She tripped and tottered from a little too much gin. If I was Foggy Jack, Kipper mused, she’d be just the kind of mark I’d be looking for... He shuddered, revolted. He didn’t want to think like a killer - like a fiend! - but Bigby suggested it would be useful to see things through Foggy Jack’s eyes.

  Kipper watched the woman go by. Finer details were visible to him now: the paste earrings, the beauty spot on her cheek, the blue five o’clock shadow-

  What the hell?

  The shape of a man stepped out of the fog, stopping the woman in her tracks. Kipper saw a glint of steel as the man, barely more than a silhouette, brandished a cutthroat razor.

  “Put your hands up, dearie!” scoffed a voice Kipper recognised as that of the first dollymop. The man wheeled around to find the whore and her gentleman client pointing pistols at his chest. The whore in the red shawl drew out a truncheon. She peeled off her wig and scratched at her undeniably male haircut.

  “Gaw’, that don’t half itch.”

  “Never mind that, Sergeant,” said the gentleman in the unmistakable tones of Bigby of the Yard. “Cuff the bastard and let’s get him down Bow Street nick.”

  The fiend let out a roar of outrage. He swirled his cloak and slashed at the air with his razor, keeping the undercover coppers at bay. “Fools!” he snarled and his eyes flashed red beneath the brim of his top hat. “Your prisons cannot hold me.”

  “They won’t have to, old love,” said Bigby. “You’ll be having your neck stretched before you can blink.”

  The fiend threw back his head and laughed. His arm darted out and he cut the first whore’s throat. She fired her gun as she fell - the shot went wide and glanced off a lamppost. Bigby’s gun would not fire. A tendril of fog curled around the nozzle, yanked the weapon from his hand and hurled it down the street. The fiend slashed at Bigby, opening a gash in his cheek. Sergeant Adams - for it was he in the red shawl - stood his ground although Kipper could see his truncheon wobbling. Drawing his gun, Kipper strode forth to defend his sergeant.

  Foggy Jack saw him coming and laughed again. Then he took everyone by surprise by dissolving into the fog - the laughter was the last to go - leaving the police one man down, empty-handed and more than a little stupefied.

  “What happened?” gasped Kipper. “Where did he go?”

  “Melted into air,” said Sergeant Adams with a faraway expression, “Into thin air.”

  Kipper gaped at the man, not least because he had never seen Adams clean-shaven before, let alone in female attire.

  Bigby knelt by the body of his fallen colleague (a Scotland Yard bloke by the name of Darby). Kipper offered him a folded handkerchief to staunch the gaping wound on his face. They stared at the spot where the fiend had been, within reach, within their grasp.

  If one can grasp fog, that is.

  The fiend had got clean away. Foggy Jack was free to strike again.

  ***

  It took several stitches to fix Bigby’s cheek. The barber-surgeon advised him it would scar.

  “Rather!” Bigby liked the idea. “A memento of my encounter with Foggy Jack. A close shave, you might say, what!”

  Kipper’s mood was less ebullient. “I don’t know how you can be so chipper,” he complained. “He got away. I say ‘he’ but I mean ‘it’. That weren’t no human we saw tonight.”

  Bigby stared at him and sucked contemplatively on his pipe. “Good lord, man, I do believe you’re serious.”

  “I am!” said Kipper. “Foggy Jack ain’t a man.”

  “Oh? Then what is he?”

  “You said it yourself: he’s a fiend.”

  Bigby chuckled as though a child had said something inadvertently amusing. “It’s just a word, old boy. Like one might say ‘opium fiend’ or ‘gambling fiend’.”

  “Pipe-smoking fiend?”

  “Ha, ha! Yes, exactly. Figurative language, old bean. Not to be taken literally.”

  “Yes, but,” said Kipper, “if he ain’t no actual fiend, what is he? Where did he appear from? Where did he disappear to? And how did he get away? You saw it, same as I did. Same as Sergeant Adams did. How did he vanish like that?”

  Bigby sighed, like a long-suffering parent having to explain something to a dim-witted offspring. “Well, clearly,” he puffed at his pipe, “It’s magic. Now, don’t get too excited and let the idea run away with you, Johnny. When I say ‘magic’ I mean ‘conjuring tricks’ of the sort one may see at any old music hall any night of the week. Think about it, man. Top hat and cloak. No stage magician worth his salt would be without them.”

  Kipper’s jaw dropped. Bigby’s idea had merit and gained in plausibility the more he thought about it.

  “Misdirection, old boy,” Bigby patted Kipper’s upper arm. “Oldest trick in the book of old tricks. Now, I must be off to Cricklewood to break the sad news to Darby’s widow - although I’ll neglect to mention the part about him being
dressed up as a tart, what! Then I’d best show my face at home, let the wife know I haven’t left her. I say, do you have a little woman waiting for you, Johnny?”

  “No,” Kipper muttered. “No woman of any size.”

  “Well, you should get one,” Bigby advised. “Can get terribly lonely, can police work. Ta-ta!”

  He left Kipper’s office with a jaunty salute. Kipper sat down heavily and thumped his blotter. The nerve of the man. And how the hell did a back-to-front like Bigby manage to bamboozle some poor cow into marrying him? It beggared belief.

  “Tea, sir!” Sergeant Adams breezed in with a tray. “It’s perked me up no end.”

  Kipper stared at the sergeant’s denuded face. “You look about nine years old,” he observed.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And for gawd’s sake, get back into uniform. That frock is doing nobody any favours.”

  Sergeant Adams blushed. His face and neck turned red so it was almost as though his beard was back. Kipper felt terrible; Adams had been through an ordeal, had bravely faced the fiend at close quarters.

  “Sergeant, I’ll need a list-”

  “Done already, sir. List of all the conjurors currently working in London theatres and music halls, sir.”

  Kipper marvelled. “How did-”

  “Stands to reason, don’t it, sir? Our man’s a magician, ain’t he? Disappearing like that. Think about it, sir. They uses blades and all. Sawing women in half. Plunging swords through wicker baskets. Chucking knives at bints on spinning wheels.”

  “Good god,” Kipper blinked. “That ain’t total nonsense.”

  Adams grinned, brimming with pride. “Thank you, sir.”

  “And that berk Bigby didn’t put you up to this?”

  “Oh, no, sir! I just used me loaf, sir. Stands to reason.”

  “Sit down, Sergeant. Join me in a cuppa. I’ll be mother.”