City of Light (City of Mystery)

by Kim Wright

  No response. Davy didn’t relish the idea of scaling the roof with a kidney pie in his hand.

  Davy scrounged around the scruffy yard until he found a pebble and sent it flying toward the window. He missed, but came close enough to ding the frame and then he yelled again. After a moment, a face cautiously came to the glass. Not Mickey, but Charlie Swinscow.

  Their last meeting had not been a pleasant one and when he spied Davy in the yard below him, Charlie pulled back in alarm.

  “I’m not here as Scotland Yard,” Davy called up, a remark that wasn’t entirely true, but which was true enough in the sense he meant no harm to the boys. “I know you’re living here and I don’t care,” he called again. “Ask Mickey if you don’t believe me. I promise that no one is going to arrest any of you.”

  A deafening silence.

  “I have a kidney pie,” Davy yelled.

  Charlie’s face was back with a comic swiftness, with the additional shapes of two more boys visible behind him.

  “Put it on the stoop,” Charlie called back.

  “Come on, boy,” Davy said, his voice gone softer. “You know the world. No one gets a kidney pie for free.”

  A consultation among the shapes.

  “What do you want?” Charlie called down.

  “Just information,” Davy said. “I want you to tell me everything you know about Henry Newlove.”

  Within a few minutes the window raised further and Charlie ventured out, followed in turn by two more boys who crawled down the rope webbing, dropped to the roof of the back stoop with practiced ease, and then one at a time swung down to the ground, where Davy stood with the basket at his feet.

  “Where’s Mickey?” he asked.

  Charlie shrugged. “Working.”

  “All right,” said Davy. “We’ll eat a bit and talk a bit.” He uncovered the basket and gestured for the boys to assume a circle, then plunked the pie in the middle and stood back.

  Within a minute, it was gone.

  “I have other things too,” Davy said, when the three of them had downed the last piece of crust.

  “Mickey said you gave him ale,” ventured one boy, looking out from an explosion of frizzled dark hair.

  “Well, I don’t have ale with me now. This basket comes from my mum, not from some tavern on the corner.”

  “I like ale,” the boy said and the others nodded.

  “Do you like bread and jam?”

  “What kind?”

  Davy almost laughed. They were an evasive and ill-mannered lot, but he rather admired the boy’s efforts to negotiate, even in a situation where he clearly did not have the advantage.

  “Strawberry. But I need information about Newlove first.”

  “I done told you,” Charlie said, not with arrogance, but with a matter-of-fact quality. “’e was our teacher after the master wouldn’t let him work no more.”

  “Why couldn’t he work no more? I mean anymore?” Davy asked.

  “Got too old,” Charlie said. “The other boy-girls stopped when they-“

  “Wait a minute,” Davy broke in. “Henry Newlove started out as one of the boy-girls?” Nods all around. “When did Henry stop serving as a boy-girl and become your procurer and your teacher?”

  “Two years, Sir? Maybe three?”

  “Did Henry like being in management or did he feel he was being passed over?”

  The question seemed to confuse Charlie, which wasn’t surprising. Newlove had been his superior both in the postal service and at Cleveland Street and likely wasn’t in the habit of confiding any hurts or disappointments he may have felt to the younger boys.

  But ale boy caught his meaning at once. “No, Sir,” he said firmly. “Master told him his boy-girl days were up and he was chaffed about it. Master said he was sixteen and that’s too old and ‘Enry said to wait a minute, that Ian had been older than sixteen. Older than….real old.” He mutely appealed to his fellows for support, raising his palms with a shrug.

  “Ian stayed a boy-girl,” said the third lad, whose freckles and coppery hair betrayed his Irish roots. “Ne’er switched over. Ne’er started to show like Henry did.”

  “Show?” Davy asked.

  The boy raised a fingertip to his top lip, as if to indicate a hint of a mustache and then looked down at his hands.

  “So you’re saying that Henry became too masculine but this boy named Ian never did,” Davy confirmed.

  Nods all around the circle.

  “So,” Davy said, “Henry was mad at Ian because Ian was able to stay a boy-girl longer than he was?”

  Charlie and the ale boy exchanged a look and Charlie tried to explain.

  “Wasn’t mad, exactly, Sir, ‘e just kept complaining to the master that it wasn’t fair.”

  “Did Henry hate Ian?”

  Now Charlie looked genuinely shocked and Davy noted that his working class accent, like those of the others, was getting stronger with each sentence. Whatever middle class patina the brothel had managed to cast over the boys had begun to wear off during their weeks without supervision. If they were left on their own in Cleveland Street much longer, they would soon be down on all fours baying at the moon. “They were brothers, weren’t they?” Charlie said. “Old ‘Enry might have been mad and said that Ian got the better part but ‘e wouldn’t of hated ‘im.”

  “Where is Ian now?”

  “Gone,” Irish said firmly.

  “Gone where?” Davy asked, flipping open the top of the basket as he asked the question. The boys looked on eagerly as he pulled out the loaf of bread and jar of jam.

  “’e got married,” Charlie said. “Years ago. Proper posh. That’s what ‘Enry wanted too, didn’t he?”

  Davy hesitated, bread in hand. It was the last thing he had expected to hear. “Married? To a woman?”

  The boys looked at him in pure puzzlement.

  “No money in that, Sir, is there?” ale boy finally asked, his hand reaching toward the bread, which Davy relinquished. “No money for the master in that.”

  “I see,” said Davy. “And let me guess. Before they came to London, Ian and Henry lived in Manchester.”

  The boys had begun ripping apart the bread, their small grimy hands darting, curved fingers scooping into the jam jar, nudging each other in their haste. Davy upended the basket and let the apples roll out onto the lawn, the lone jar of pickles toppling out last. Charlie paused and looked up, his face smeared with red jam, and gave a quick nod.

  Paris

  10:02 AM

  It is more taxing to count to 7250 than one might guess. In the four years she had known her, this was also the longest Emma had ever known Geraldine to go without speaking. The older woman’s face was twisted in determination and the two of them walked stoically down the riverbank arm in arm. Emma knew that for a dedicated social volunteer like Geraldine the sight of so much poverty – dwelling literally in the shadows of a middle class neighborhood – would in itself be distracting, but Geraldine stuck to her task. They had agreed to count separately and to stop when they got to 5000. It had taken them nearly thirty minutes to reach this milestone. After looking about a bit, they found a small stone wall where Geraldine might rest.

  “How are you holding up?” Emma asked, hoping she sounded casual, although she was actually quite concerned. Walking the sloping bank, with its mud and ruts, was an entirely different matter than strolling down a sidewalk and Geraldine was flushed and breathless from the effort. Emma was beginning to think she truly should have waited for Tom. “Perhaps we might go back up to the street. Look for a tea room or some place you can properly rest before we resume.”

  Geraldine shook her head. “I’ll be fine, dear, just give me a minute. It certainly reeks, doesn’t it?”

  She was right. The entire area around the river was musty and brackish but the air in this particular point was overwhelmingly sour.

  “It smells like a sewer,” Geraldine said.

  “Probably because it is one,” Emma said, pee
ring over the stone wall where Geraldine was sitting. “Look, there’s a grate down there just behind you, releasing into the river. Careful,” she said, when Geraldine twisted to look over her shoulder. “Heaven knows, you don’t want to topple back.”

  Emma and Tom had not seen it while floating in darkness the night before, but they must have passed this point in the river, where a series of stone walls such as the one where Geraldine rested outlined the entrance into the sewer. The concrete mouth gaped, large enough for a man to enter without stooping, and a steady trickle of refuse washed from the tunnel into the river. Tom had said that city rivers were fed by sewers rather than springs, but Emma hadn’t really understood what he meant at the time.

  “Horrid to consider that they’ve built their little… houses, I suppose you’d say, that press right up against it,” Geraldine murmured. “I can’t imagine what it must smell like in the summer.”

  “The sewer is a wall,” Emma said. “A strong one, made of concrete. So thus they have a fair start on their houses before they pick up the first hammer.”

  “Yes, of course, but the sanitation…and there are children.”

  Emma nodded, but for once she wasn’t thinking about the downtrodden, about children living in filth or women turning to prostitution in an effort to feed those children, or even the drunken, violent men who preyed on both. “It’s dreadful, yes, but also the perfect place to hide someone. This particular drain is too close to where the bodies were found, but my guess is that there are several more places where sewers empty into the Seine, and that one of them is about 2500 paces further up the river. Have you rested enough? Shall we count down the final bit?”

  But Geraldine was staring at a woman passing before them, a woman who was evidently returning from a hard night’s work and who managed to have a bit of both a stagger and a swagger in her step.

  “Emma,” Geraldine said, her voice so low that Emma had to bend to hear her. “Do you find anything odd in that girl? Look at how she’s dressed.”

  Emma considered the woman. She was well past forty and would only be called a girl by someone the age of Geraldine. Notably dirty, her hair arranged in an attempt at a chignon, perhaps a style she had seen on a passing lady in the street and tried to copy, with limited success. But her clothes, just as Geraldine had suggested, did not fit the picture at all. They were dirty, true, but not nearly so much as the rest of her, and her dress was lovely, or at least might have been in a different context. It was topped with a smartly-cut jacket, very much like one Emma had seen in the dress shop the day before.

  “Where did a street woman get such clothing?” Emma said aloud.

  “Note the colors of her outfit,” Geraldine said gently.

  “Plum, purple, pink. Odd all together, but they do combine unlikely hues in Paris couture. We saw as much on the Rue de Monge yesterday, did we not?”

  Geraldine’s eyes never left the woman, who had now stopped to talk to a man who appeared as shaky on his feet as she was on hers. “You’re missing the point, dear. Aren’t those the colors Rayley said Isabel was wearing on the morning they climbed the tower?”

  “Yes. Yes, you’re right. He described her outfit most specifically. But that can’t be Isabel Blout.” Emma could think of no circumstances, including the most through of scrubs, under which the woman standing before them might have ever been declared the greatest beauty in London.

  “Of course not,” said Geraldine. “We haven’t found Isabel, but we may have found her clothes.”

  “All that we’ve found are clothes in the same colors that Rayley described,” Emma said quickly, for if Trevor had been here, he would never have allowed them to get away with such vaulting leaps of logic. “There must be hundreds of such outfits walking the streets of Paris.”

  “Hundreds?”

  “All right, not hundreds. But more than one. We must not jump to conclusions.”

  “I’m not jumping to conclusions,” Geraldine said patiently, as the woman in plum took the man’s arm and began to walk with him toward the opening to the sewer. “I’m not coming to any conclusion at all. I’m merely pointing out that Isabel Blout is missing, and now clothing that matches the description of one of her outfits has turned up on a street woman. What would Trevor say about that if he was here? What are the most logical of all possible explanations?”

  “That Isabel has been killed and someone has taken -“ Emma stopped herself. “Oh, no, that’s not it. I quite see what you mean. It’s just as it happened with me and Tom last night. Isabel escaped wearing beautiful and expensive clothing, which she knew would make her stand out in this setting like a diamond in the mud. So she has traded them for another woman’s clothes.” Emma was growing quite agitated with optimism. “Oh Gerry, do you think she’ll talk to us?”

  “Certainly. If she’s paid to do so.”

  “Of course, of course. I’m being nonsensical.” Emma leaned over the stone wall and peered into the entrance to the sewer. “Dear God, they’ve totally disappeared. How long do you think they’ll be gone?”

  “Not long, I should think.”

  “But it seems they’ve actually walked into the mouth of the…good heavens, it’s ankle deep in muck down there, how can they manage to…”

  “I doubt they’re lying down, dear.”

  Emma slumped to the stone wall beside Geraldine. “I’m such a dunce about these things. No wonder Trevor and Tom treat me like a child.”

  “We must be logical, not despairing,” Geraldine said, raising a crooked index finger in mimicry of a stern schoolmarm. “Let us concoct a plan. First we shall wait for the girl to conclude her business and then pay her for information. Let me do this, dear, and I shall start with offering just a franc or two. It will do us no good to flash about great wads of money in this distressing part of town. We shall ask her to tell us everything she can remember about the woman who gave her these clothes and we shall ask her to describe, in infinite detail, what she herself was wearing before the swap. Thus we will be able to give Trevor not only the news that Isabel is most likely hiding somewhere in the river district, but what she might be wearing.” Geraldine paused for breath. “And, while the men are rounding up Isabel, you and I shall walk the final 2500 steps and free dear Rayley. And then we shall all have tea.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Paris

  10:36 AM

  Armand Delacroix was a man with broad financial interests, not all of them relevant to the matter at hand. This Trevor and Tom concluded after visiting the first two houses on Rayley’s list, both of which were located reasonably close to the river but which upon inspection turned out to be nothing more than middle class houses for rental, additional sources of income for the ever-resourceful Delacroix. Now they stood on the sidewalk of the Boulevard Saint-Michal and gazed at Delacroix’s own home, an impressive brick affair which had been painted white and was largely covered with a bank of ivy.

  “He’s come a long way from 229 Cleveland Street, hasn’t he?” Tom said drily.

  “He isn’t using this house as a brothel,” Trevor said, his eyes taking in the perfectly tended gardens and the charming window boxes dotted with flowers. “He lives here himself, probably with the child he calls Marianne and Isabel too, at least until she escaped. Rubois says he hosts parties much like the one we attended last night.”

  “So where is the actual business conducted?”

  “Most likely in some of the rooms on this list. But not so many boys are involved and not so many clients either, I should think. Delacroix appears to have learned from his mistakes in London and has decided to streamline his Paris operation. The parties are to procure and groom clients, as well as to sustain his public façade as a civic crusader. The actual liaisons take place elsewhere.”

  “We need to be looking closer to the water,” Tom said impatiently. “Not these polite little neighborhoods, but the rougher streets.”

  “What makes you so sure?” asked Trevor. “Whether in London
or Paris, Delacroix seems to make a habit of conducting his business in, as you say, polite little neighborhoods. For all we know, he could be holding Rayley in the most pleasant looking house in Paris.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Tom. “Emma will hang me for telling you this, but last night –“

  Just then a bicycle approached them, bouncing on the cobblestoned street.

  “Detective Welles?” asked the young man, whom Trevor now noted was dressed as a flic, his uniform obscured by his jacket. When Trevor nodded, he pulled a telegram from his front pocket and handed it over with a smart, almost military gesture.