The Limehouse Text

by Will Thomas

  9

  NEVIL BAINBRIDGE’S FUNERAL WAS NOT TO BE forgotten. As if in sympathy, rain wept steadily from an iron-gray heaven, icy raindrops that one could hear break on the waterproofs of the constables in attendance. All of us were in black and in misery, as if being here reminded us all of our own mortality. Even the statues of angels and men, ingrained with soot like sketches in charcoal, looked forlorn and miserable, wishing they could be somewhere else; but there was nowhere to go. The whole of London was blanketed under a leaden sky.

  Standing under my umbrella, huddled into my macintosh for warmth, I wondered how long the service would go on. There was a great deal of ceremony to get through. It is rare when an officer is killed, and Scotland Yard seeks for an air of solemn grandeur and profound tragedy. Every now and then I got a glimpse within the waterproofs of the dress uniforms, with their epaulettes and braids, helmets and white gloves, of the constables and inspectors. In a show of toughness on the part of the Yard, none carried umbrellas, and the constables stood at attention, chins dripping and ice crystals lodged in their mustaches. Barker and I had no such restriction and made full use of our umbrellas, the droplets drumming on the waxed cotton and falling in a circle around us, save when a gust of cold wind whipped them over our trousers and shoes. I like rainy mornings in London, even in February, but only when I can spend them in a nice coffeehouse or a Charing Cross bookshop. Only lunatics, or someone heavily entrenched in ritual and duty, would be out on a morning like this.

  Bainbridge’s widow was not a cheering sight. She was heavy and severe under a pair of beetling brows and a bonnet full of black feathers, as if a raven had wandered onto her hat and died of pure wretchedness. She glared through the commissioner’s address, she glared through the brief eulogy the minister gave, and she glared as her late husband’s wooden coffin was set to rest at the bottom of the grave. I would have liked to have given her the benefit of the doubt and to have said she had once been beautiful or kind or solicitous of the poor, but I was not feeling generous at that moment. Generosity comes with dry socks, I think.

  I was in awe of death then, and now after many years and experiences, still am. I have never grown jaded about it. One minute we are sentient beings and the next, fodder for worms. What was the Good Lord thinking? I wished I had the assurance my employer had. There he stood beside me under his umbrella in his black macintosh, bowler hat coming down almost to the top of his spectacles, solemn, yes, but serene. He did not seem to feel the wet or the cold or the fear of death. I knew without asking that he was not subject to the doubts that were causing my misery and that afterward he would comment upon the sermon or the sublimity of the ceremony. I wondered whether it was merely the stoical training he had undergone in his lifetime, or if it was his character—in which case, I might never attain it.

  “I think old Bainy would have approved of his funeral,” Barker said, as we walked from the grave after the ceremony had ended. “He was finally given the recognition by his superiors he deserved.”

  We stopped to give way to a knot of Metropolitan Police dignitaries, including Commissioner Henderson of the Criminal Investigation Department and Munro of the Special Irish Branch. They all shot a cold glare Barker’s way, as if to ask, “Who let him in?” In the center was Terence Poole, looking worse even than I felt. The responsibility of finding Bainbridge’s killer fell foursquare upon his shoulders. I am sure all had taken him in hand, urging him to find this killer, as if he were a lost dog who simply needed to be rounded up. I would imagine there was a barb or two in the commissioner’s speech reserved just for Barker’s old friend and physical culture partner.

  It was not my original intent to become an enquiry agent’s assistant, but I was glad at least that we were private rather than public servants. We answered to no one but our clients. We could stop and have lunch and talk about something else for a while and could go home to a nice meal and a good soak, at least most of the time. We had half Saturdays and full Sundays off. Admittedly, on some cases, we might work ’round the clock, but, again, that was part of the elasticity of our position.

  I thought the Scotland Yard officials’ opinion of us unfair, saying we “lived by our wits,” the same phrase they used for safecrackers and confidence men. Some private agents were men who had been unsuccessful as police constables, I knew, and were not above breaking into residences to acquire evidence or performing other illegal activities. Cyrus Barker, whom I considered the cream of his profession, rarely used such techniques. He might bend a rule, but he rarely broke one. Were they jealous of his success, perhaps, or did they look down their noses at the fact that he placed advertisements in the newspapers for his services? For whatever reason, it was yet another act of which the Guv took no notice. As far as he was concerned, it was just more rain down the back of his waterproof.

  My teeth were chattering when we came out of the cemetery, and I knew our chances of finding a cab were almost nonexistent. We were in Whitechapel, a very downtrodden section of town hard by the City. Barker seemed to know where he was going, if I didn’t. He took a left at one corner, a right at the next, and passed through an alleyway so narrow we had to close our umbrellas. How much longer were we going to walk? I wondered. My trouser legs were soaked through and my boots were becoming sodden.

  Barker opened the door to a pub called the Ten Bells and I stepped gratefully inside. Warmth from food and human bodies and a roaring fire at one end flushed my features and fogged Barker’s spectacles. We stood at the bar and ordered pints and fell upon the free meal offered: boiled eggs and cheese, pickles and pickled onions, and crusty slices of bread slathered in butter. We took it all in and when our stomachs were full and our pint glasses half empty, we took off our waterproofs and sat down on a bench by the fire. God bless the Ten Bells and proper publicans everywhere, I thought.

  “Do you know every building in London?” I asked.

  “Almost, and you should, too. I have some very good ordnance maps, with my own notes jotted on them, that I made during my first few years here. It is important at times to know where the closest constabulary is or even the closest grog shop. Nice place, this, eh?”

  “Better than Whitechapel deserves.”

  Barker got out his traveling pipe and set it ablaze, and we spent an agreeable half hour baking our feet dry again on the fender, thinking of the constables who had changed out of their dress blacks and were back on their beats until day’s end.

  “Lad, you’re falling asleep.”

  I sniffed and rubbed my face. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t get much rest last night. Do you think our killer might simply give up now that he knows you’re after him?”

  “He won’t give up. He has killed several times and has proven how unrelenting his determination is to get his hands on the manuscript.”

  “It makes no sense. I mean, Bainbridge was right: it is just a book. Let us say the killer did lay hands on it. What would he do with it? It wouldn’t make him rich or powerful.”

  “I’ll admit, lad, I haven’t worked that out myself. He may never have told a soul. Whatever it is, I feel it is something big, something very important, at least to him. He must not have it. I shall not be content until I see it back in the monastery it came from.”

  “Even if we have to take it there ourselves?” I asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “But first, you’ll have to get it again, because you gave it to a Chinaman.”

  “I trust I can lay hands on it when the moment comes.”

  “Is it in the East End?”

  Barker knocked his pipe on the fender. “This is not a parlor game, lad. Come. We have work to do.”

  “Where to next, sir?” I asked, putting down my empty pint glass. My boots had dried out a little, and I had convinced myself that somewhere in the world at that moment a warm sun was shining down and might even come here someday. If anything, the room suddenly seemed too hot, pungent with hops and tobacco smoke. I wanted to be out again in the cold, crisp air
.

  “K Division, or at least Bainbridge’s constabulary in East India Dock Road. I want to get permission to go through his files. If he had a clue or a possible suspect in the crime, he wouldn’t have told us, not right away. He came to us only because he could not legally get the book himself. I am almost surprised he did not simply thump Mr. Hurtz with his truncheon and take it. Bainbridge was known for the direct approach, and he was a steady officer for many years.”

  We took the tram into Limehouse. Sailor town does not improve in inclement weather, save that the pavement is not crowded by street sellers of dried squid and other “treats.” We had the streets to ourselves. Merchants halfheartedly called to us as we passed from the shadows of their shops. They recognized Barker now. It was Shi Shi Ji this and Shi Shi Ji that. They didn’t bother translating for my benefit. Barker stopped to talk once or twice. This was it, I told myself. He’s going to talk to all six hundred Chinamen in London, and when he’s done with them, he’ll start on the Lascars.

  East India Dock Road is a continuation of Commercial Road, but the great thoroughfare dwindles considerably when it reaches the dockyards. Bainbridge’s constabulary was a red brick building tucked in among the others in the street like a book on a shelf. Only the blue light suspended out in the street gave warning that this was the sole bastion of law and order in this sailor’s haven. Stepping inside, I was expecting the chaos I’ve seen before in the booking area of A Division at Great Scotland Yard itself. It was not so. There were no more than two or three constables on duty, but they seemed to have everything in hand. A lone fellow in a pair of wrist darbies sat talking with an officer, and two citizens waited patiently to be served. It looked as if Bainbridge had run a tight ship. One could get the impression that this was a sleepy little backwater constabulary where nothing ever happens. One would, however, be wrong. The first thing we discovered when we walked in the door was that the constabulary had just narrowly missed being burned to the ground. Bainbridge’s files, the ones we had come to see, had been reduced to ash.

  “Burned, you say?” the Guv rasped to the solid-looking police sergeant in charge of the desk. “All of them?”

  “Aye, sir. A little after midnight, it was. P. C. Threadgill, he does the overnight duty, you see, he smelled smoke and saw it coming from under the inspector’s door. The dustbin had been set in the middle of the floor and some files set alight in it. A regular blaze it was, according to Threadgill, and he was afeared it’d burn down the building. He poured water and sand from the fire bucket on it and then opened windows down the hall to kill the smoke. It was burnt to cinders, all them files Bainy—I mean Detective Inspector Bainbridge—had recorded so metic’lously. A crying shame, I says, and the place all reeking of smoke now. The back windows is open and all of us with our teeth chattering.”

  “May I see his office?” Barker asked.

  The constable hesitated a moment. We were unofficial, after all, but then, anything of interest had already been burned. He finally nodded. “A quick look wouldn’t hurt nothing, I ’spect.”

  “You have no suspects?” my employer asked as we were led back to the office.

  “Not a one that we can pin down,” the constable admitted. “And before you ask, no, not so much as a scrap of paper could be saved. Between the fire, the sand, and the water, there was nothing but moldering ash.”

  “Murder,” the Guv muttered to me as we walked, “of a police officer and now arson in a London constabulary. This killer would appear to have no fear of Scotland Yard at all.”

  The constable set his key in the lock and turned it. The smell of smoke was far stronger in here, though nothing had been burned save the files. A gray discoloration marked the center of the ceiling over the spot where the bin stood.

  “Was this open last night?” my employer asked, pointing toward the open window.

  “Aye, sir, but it’s a sheer wall. It would take a monkey to climb it.”

  Barker grunted and moved to the desk on which was a common blotter of green paper, a map of the city, and pencils standing in a cup. A wooden chair on casters was pulled up to the desk, a chair which had been worn down by the seat of Bainbridge’s trousers for years but would be worn down no farther. A few prints of the early days of the station and the Bow Street Runners hung on the wall. There was not much left behind after so many years on duty, I thought.

  “Took the top blotter sheet, too,” the constable noted.

  “Why?” Barker queried.

  “Old Bainy was a sketcher, sir. It was how he worked out his cases. Helped him think, he said. Wasn’t a bad artist, neither. Could have had him a job as an illustrator for the newspapers if he weren’t a copper down to his boots.”

  “Interesting,” Barker declared, pouring the pencils from the cup onto the blotter. Taking a pencil in his hand, he started in the upper right-hand corner and began to move the lead back and forth across the blotting paper. What child in Britain had not taken a piece of paper to an old gravestone and rubbed an etching of an old knight or dame?

  “We shall look this over, and if it bears fruit, you shall give it to Inspector Poole when he comes in.”

  It took close to a half hour of rubbing and several pencils before the two of us finished the blotter. As imperfect as the images were, they gave us a very good look into the mind of the late Inspector Nevil Bainbridge. The constable was correct: the inspector had been quite an artist.

  “Lad, get out your notebook,” the Guv ordered.

  I retrieved it from my pocket, set it down on a cabinet, and prepared to write in my best Pitman shorthand, despite not being able to hold the pad with one arm in a cast.

  “In the upper left-hand corner we have the letters H and P enclosed in a diamond. There is nothing along that same latitude until we get to the middle of the paper, where we discover the head and shoulders of a sinister-looking fellow in a wide-brimmed hat and fur collar who I suspect is Mr. K’ing. Close to the upper right-hand corner, there is another face, larger and very wild: fierce teeth, bristling mustache, rolling eyes, a complete caricature of an Asian face. By the corner of the face is a wooden flail, two sticks connected by a rope. In the middle, there is a form bent over a line, loose, like one of those string puppets. What are they called?”

  “Marionettes, sir.”

  “Yes. The line stretches for some distance across the picture, then coils into a loop of rope. By the figure’s shoulder is a rough shape, which I believe is a coffin. Near the center of the page is a female form, nicely rendered but without a face. She wears a shawl and straw hat, and her hair is cut straight across her shoulders. I presume it is light colored, for he does not appear to have darkened it. Blond or red. The pose, holding the shawl around her, is demure and yet there is some voluptuousness to the figure. Two men are off to the right, in profile, as if watching the girl. One is taller than the other. They are shaded heavily, but I believe them to be Campbell-Ffinch and his interpreter, Woo.

  “On the bottom row, there is a figure slumped on the floor and a group of lines going back and forth away from him, like the teeth of a saw or steps. I adduce it is the image of Jan Hurtz, whom Bainbridge would have seen firsthand. There is a small sketch of a ship, possibly the Blue Funnel ship Ajax. We shall see. Here, where the coil of rope ends are three balls and a ticket, the one we gave to Hurtz’s brother. There is an almost comically menacing face, with a heavy beard, leering and ready to devour the maiden in the center. And here, at the very lower right-hand corner, is the face of my late assistant, whom Bainbridge had the poor taste to show as we found him on that terrible day, eyes half shut, arms thrown wide, and the bullet hole dead center. That is all.”

  “That’s one, two, five…nine figures altogether, and we know but half of them,” I pointed out.

  “Can you draw, lad?”

  “Not this well, sir.”

  “See if you can copy all these images. Let me go get the constable again.”

  He returned a few minutes later with the
constable, who scratched his chin at our work. “That’s good thinking,” he admitted. “I would never have thought of it. This is the property of Scotland Yard, however. You won’t be able to take it with you.”

  “We understand that. Do any of these people look familiar to you?”

  “This ugly brute here,” he said, indicating the fierce face in the upper right-hand corner, is Charlie Han. He’s a young tough in Limehouse with a sizable corner of the betel nut market in his pocket. Inspector Bainbridge was always hauling him in on small charges. Now this coffin here and the fellow on the line, I think that’s Jonas Coffin’s place. A Chinaman died there last year. Funny name. Chow, I believe, Luke Chow. Coffin owns a penny hang in West India Dock Road. And there’s no missing who the girl is. We call her the Belle o’ Pennyfields. Works at a chandlery since her uncle was killed a year ago.”

  “Killed, you say?” Barker asked.

  “Yes, sir. He was robbed one evening. New Year’s Day, it was. Found dead behind the counter of his shop, with his neck broke, from what I hear.”

  “What is the girl’s name?” Barker asked.

  “Gypsy name, she has. Petulengro, same as her uncle’s. Hettie Petulengro.”

  The Guv turned to me. “There is your H P, lad.”

  “And what, may I ask, is going on here?” an official voice demanded from the doorway. It was Terence Poole, and he did not look pleased. He dismissed the constable with a glower and then turned on us.

  “That is Metropolitan Police property,” Poole said, pointing at the blotter.

  “We were merely deciphering it,” Barker said. “We have identified all but one of the figures here.”

  “You needn’t try to sound all helpful with me,” Poole said, reaching into his pocket. “I spoke to the Dutchman who says you took possession of the book in his brother’s pawnshop.” He tossed a business card on the blotter. It was the very one he had given to Hurtz. “I want that book!”