by John Gardner
Ta-ra-ra-ra-ra—all together now—
I’m getting a big boy now …
And I fancy it’s time I knew how.
I’m getting a big boy now.”
WHILE SPEAR AND TERREMANT were off planning how to deal with the stray lambs, so Ember and the evil Chinee, Lee Chow, were heading toward another memorable moment: on the prowl for the man who had been described as hard as the Rock of Gibraltar by the boy Billy Walker, who added that he was muscled all over and had a shaved head—a bullethead. Sidney Streeter, once one of Moriarty’s brutal boys, now seemingly joined hip and thigh to Idle Jack and ready to do his bidding, his bodyguard—a sharer of secrets.
Lee Chow’s reputation may give Sidney Streeter pause, Ember considered as the two murderous mobsmen made their way unerringly toward The Mermaid tavern in Hackney Wick, where Ember recalled Streeter drinking on most days around the noon hour.
They went by a double-decker omnibus, drawn by two docile nags, almost all the way, the vehicle advertising Nestlé’s Milk, Pears Soap, and Virginia Cigarettes. Close to the Hackney Wick bus stop there was a stand for cabs, four of them there with the horses nibbling carrots and the cabbies dozing, whips in hand.
Moriarty kept a large number of people “on the books,” as he put it: doctors, surgeons, undertakers, publicans, politicians, a pair of policemen, nurses, even lawyers, and, of course, cabbies. Ember looked up, getting off the omnibus, and saw Josiah Osterley, hansom cab license number 7676, his piebald horses named Valentine and Vivian, a growler-shover because he had a larger cab, four-wheeled, suitable to go on a growler around the pubs and fancy houses. Ember signalled him on, pausing to give him instructions. “Not now,” he told him. “But when we’re inside. You stop outside and linger in case we need you.”
Osterley was a taciturn man; he didn’t speak much. He nodded, indicating he would do anything they wanted; Ember had only to say the word.
They had to walk only half a mile now, reaching the tavern at a quarter after noon. And there was Streeter standing in the Saloon Bar, drinks in and with two men known to Ember and Lee Chow—Jonah Whalen and Sheet Simpson, both formerly in Bert Spear’s brigade, therefore Moriarty men.
The Saloon Bar was spacious, done out in a lot of mahogany panelling, with plenty of gilding and much glass, the glass ground and decorated with curlicues and flourishes. There was a girl, nicely dressed in a starched full apron, seeing to a hot box where she was cooking sausages and potatoes for serving all day long; and next door in the Public Bar they had a piano and were singing old music-hall songs quite raucously, even though it was not yet half past noon.
They sang:
“I’m a doo-ced toff of a fellow,
My makeup I reckon’s immense,
I’m the Marquis of Camberwell Green—
I’m the downiest dude ever seen,
I’m a Gusher—
I’m a Rusher—
I’m the Marquis of Camberwell Green.”
“Sidney,” Ember called loudly to Streeter, leaning against the counter, and the little bullet-headed man turned around, automatically assuming the boxer stance, ready for anything. Ember took in the whole man and his clothing: the narrow trousers, none of these newfangled turn-ups, the cloth a worsted in a hound’s-tooth check. A matching jacket, shorter these days, three buttons, all fastened, and his shirt open at the neck—no tie, no neckerchief, nothing for a fighter to catch hold of—while the trousers were cut simple and there was one vent in the jacket that meant easy access to whatever he had hidden behind his hip, one side or the other. A fighter’s rig. A heavy topcoat thrown over a nearby chair and a hard bowler resting on top.
Sidney Gresham Streeter gave them a sideways look—sly, expecting trouble, looking for it—while his cronies had their eyes slipping side to side, not knowing where to look, concerned knowing Lee Chow’s reputation.
“Hands on the bar,” the whippet Ember snapped in his high little voice, seeing Streeter’s arm starting to stray toward his back, just behind his right hip, and Lee Chow came up beside him, one strong hand clasping the right wrist, a wicked knife in his left hand, a humourless smile decorating the Asian’s face, slant-eyes glittering.
The landlord appeared behind the bar, like the Demon King in a Christmas pantomime. “Here, here,” he growled. “None o’ that. We don’t want no trouble here.”
“No t’ouble,” said Lee Chow, tight and close to Streeter, turning now, swapping hands, his back to the bar. “No t’ouble. You likee dlink, Mr. Steeter?”
The other two, Whalen and Simpson, had nodded some secret agreement, starting to walk away, toward the door.
“Oi, Jonah! Sheet! Back with you,” Ember commanded. “Want a word! Alright?”
Sheet Simpson kept going, but Jonah Whalen stopped, swivelled, and took the two steps back to Streeter’s side. Bugger, Ember thought, that Simpson’s going to return with friends, and while we’re evenly matched now, I don’t think we’d be up to it if Simpson brought back another pair of fancy dancers.
“I’ve no quarrel with you, Mr. Ember.” Streeter looked uncomfortable, eyes trying to take in too much, searching them both and trying to look farther afield.
“No? Well, that means you’ve no quarrel with the Professor, then.”
“The Professor? Moriarty? You mean he’s back?”
“You know bloody well he’s back. What’s more, he wants to see you. Wants it bad…have a little chat with you.”
“He does? Why me?”
“Why not?”
“Well, we thought him gone. Gone for good, the Professor. Had to find work where we could.”
“Really?” Ember raised his eyes to the ceiling. “You thought he’d gone and left you, eh, Sid? Left you all on your own? Dear, oh dear me. That why you went running to Idle Jack?”
“Idle Jack? I don’’ave nothing to do wi’ Idle Jack. The very idea!”
“You was wiv ’im last night, Sid. Don’t deny it. We know you was wiv ’im, like you’re wiv ’im most of the time. We know. The Professor knows.”
“P’ofessor want talk wi’ you, S’teety. You wi’ Irol Jack a’most twen’-fou’ hour ev-ly day. You stick him like shadow.” Lee Chow relaxed the pressure on the man’s wrist and stroked it, slowly, as if stroking the hand of a woman. “Si’ney, wha’ we tewl P’ofessor if you no come wi’ us? Eh?”
“Come wiv you? Me? Think I was brought up by candlelight? Born on a Wednesday looking both ways to Sunday?”
“You know me, Sidney.” Ember took a pace closer, nestling in on the man, body touching body; and Lee Chow put out an arm to restrain Whalen, who made a move as if to leave again. “Best come and see the Professor with us.” Ember turned slightly and said, harsh now, “And you, Whalen. Both of you.”
“You’re joking, Mr. Ember. Me, come into the same room as the Professor? Not on your trouble, mate.”
“You’ll have to see him, sooner or later.”
Next door, in the Public Bar, they had changed the tune:
“Tinkle, tinkle! Let your glasses chink!
Bright and sparkling ruby we will drink,
Tinkle, tinkle, up my lads and bawl!
Hip hip hurrah! And jolly good luck to us all!”
Raucous as ever. Ember thought the Professor wouldn’t like it here. He remembered, after Pip Paget’s wedding, the big party the Professor threw for him in the warehouse—Moriarty’s secret hideout. That got lively, a lot of singing and a good knees-up; but the Professor bowed out early, didn’t like all the noise and rowdiness.
“Look.” Streeter was giving a lopsided smile. “Look, Mr. Ember. I have an idea.”
Ho, yes, Ember thought, an idea? A notion? A wheeze? Anything that come out of Sidney’s ideas-box would have only one aim: to come to Sidney’s aid. Probably not worth a jigger, but there’s no harm in hearing out the bullet-headed rough.
Ember was no fool. His aim was to get Streeter to Moriarty by the quickest and quietest way possible, or if not, then to send him to Ha
des. The other toughy, Simpson, had made it out quickly, and Ember knew he’d be back. There were other people in the bar who kept glancing over, knew there was something dodgy going on. So—
“What’s your idea then, Sid?” he said, smiling back, looking like he was ready to do anything to help the man. “Speak out. Tell me and I’ll see if we can oblige.”
“I take him to P’ofessor,” Lee Chow lisped, the Chinaman having already pledged his oath when they were all last with Moriarty. (“I seek Sidney ou’. I a’ange Sidney.”)
The chilling offer. Lee Chow making himself responsible for bringing the traitorous Streeter back, a penitent, to Professor Moriarty; or, of course, doing the other thing.
Streeter grinned at Ember, a worm stirring in each of his light brown eyes, revealing duplicity.
“Speak out,” Ember repeated.
“I was thinking.” Streeter’s face crumpled up as though it was taking all his resources to concentrate and summon thought on the matter. “Thinking,” he repeated, then, again, “thinking, maybe I could first talk with Mr. Spear. I was in Mr. Spear’s brigade, after all. He knows me, knows my worth. Before we take this too far and burden the Professor with it…”
“With what?” They were now in the first stages of haggling, Ember thought. They were engaging in a Jew’s friendly.
“Wiv whatever lies they’re telling about me. This deliberate falsehood as I bin hanging around with that napper, Idle Jack Idell.”
“You’d like to see Bert Spear before anyone else?”
“I think that would be the way forward.”
“Yes.” Ember gave Lee Chow a long look. “Chow, this is a good idea, I think.”
“Goo’ ideah.” Lee Chow sounded like an infant learning to speak. “Velly goo’ ideah.” As he said it, the Chinee slid his arm round the back of Streeter’s waist and came back with what Ember later described as “a damned great metal pen-nib,” which cleared the bar in two seconds flat. Lee Chow turned the long curved blade in his hand, gave an evil grin, and said, “To clean fingernails, ay? Velly tidy, cleaning finge’nails.”
In the Public they were now singing “Pretty Little Sarah”:
“Oh! Pretty little Sarah, with lovely golden hair,
Her beauty jealous maidens may be scorning.
She ought to be an angel, but if rich I were,
I’d marry her so early in the morning.”
Josh Osterley had his cab outside, the growler that would take all four of them, sitting facing each other, Lee Chow hanging on to Whalen, who did not look happy, and Ember with his arm linked to Sidney Streeter, who, from the moment they set off in the direction of the West End, gave the impression of a man worrying about some grave problem in his life: He was moving about like a bored child, pursing his lips and sighing noisily.
They negotiated the heavy traffic around Piccadilly and were headed along Coventry Street toward Leicester Square, when he finally started to speak.
“I got to tell you.”
“What?” Ember asked.
“A piece of intelligence. Something the Professor should know. He won’t like it, but I know what’s happened, and I think it should be passed on. It’s Sal. Sal Hodges.”
“What is Sal Hodges?”
“The Professor’s been away too long. It’s about his bit of cuff.”
“Sal was Mother Judge to all the Professor’s girls.”
“She was more than that, Mr. Ember. We all knew it. She was the Professor’s seamstress, his needlewoman, and the mother of his child.”
“That’s as may be, but what’s your special intelligence?”
“Now don’t be angry, Mr. Ember. Don’t be angry.” Streeter was pressed back against the leather padding behind him, almost trying to find some way out of the carriage.
“What would I be angry about?” Ember puzzled at this rough bully who was attempting to calm him. It must be something terrible, he thought.
It was.
“She’s dead, Mr. Ember. Sal Hodges is dead. Strangled. I’m not supposed to know but I’ve heard. Sal’s murdered, with her body stowed away in a house near Brick Lane, what used to be part of the Flowerydean.”
“You…” Ember did not know what to say to him. “Down the Flowerydean?”
The Flowerydean had at one time been the most notorious street in London—Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields, on the edge of Whitechapel. Two victims of Jack the Ripper in 1888, both prostitutes, had come from the Flowerydean, Polly Nichols and “Long Liz” Stride. But the Flowerydean was no more; it had been removed, taken down, flattened, its inhabitants moved on, the cheap lodging houses destroyed and all but a few houses restyled and rebuilt.
“Go Awber’ Speah.” Lee Chow swallowed, anxious.
If this was true—if Sal Hodges was indeed murdered and dead—what then?
“Jesus,” Ember said aloud.
Back at The Mermaid in Hackney Wick, they were still singing and drinking in the Public Bar:
“Champagne Charlie is my name,
Champagne Charlie is my game,
Good for any game at night my boys,
Good for any game at night my boys,
Who’ll come and join me in a spree?
Who’ll come and join me in a spree?
Champagne Charlie is my name …”
Taddle-ta-rar-rar-rar … la-la…
7
Death of a Courtesan
LONDON: JANUARY 17, 1900
CAPTAIN RATFORD’S PLACE, where Moriarty had arranged for three of his Praetorian Guard to lodge, was generally known as Captain Ratford’s Rooms, just off Lisle Street hard by Leicester Square. Ratford himself was a small, fiery man with a little spiky moustache and a crimson face, his nose bulbous and blue-mottled, which silently signalled drink. If the truth be told, the Captain had not been near anything more military than walking alongside Horse Guards Parade, nor more naval than occasionally travelling across the Channel in the packet from Dover to Calais. If faced with this, he would bluster and say that “Captain” was an honorary rank. That was as far as you got. No more. Captain Ratford was not given to explanations.
He had six rooms, some large and made up in pairs on the upper two stories of the big old house left to him by his grateful wife, who had departed this vale of tears on a hot summer Thursday two years previously, her death sudden and never fully explained but categorized as an accident by the coroner, an old friend of Ratford’s who, it was said, owed the Captain money. Ratford also had a pair of water closets and two rooms fitted out with baths and wash hand basins, though by the look of him you would wonder if he ever used these facilities himself.
Albert Spear had been given the largest set of rooms, a spacious parlour adjoined by a smaller room containing only a brass bedstead with a side table. The decoration was not the finest, but the Captain catered to men who cared little for fripperies: There was wallpaper tinted with a small pattern of dog roses, and a pair of paintings copied from the work of Arthur Boyd Houghton, who specialized in groups of contemporary people, reflecting the constraints on ordinary folk, their uncertain lives and the strangeness of individuals within big-city life in the 1850s and ‘60s. One group on Spear’s wall showed anxious children with men and women who appeared careworn, possibly begging, living on the edges of respectability, in a way threatening, some of them macabre. Certainly some were sinister, especially when you looked at individuals in the crowd: big, hard-faced grotesques, men you would never like to be left alone with, or women you’d never trust with your child, potential monsters, the kind of people who spring from nightmares. These were all persons instantly recognizable to Spear, though who knew if he would look at the pictures in a way that might bring about an understanding of what they were trying to say—something about the manner in which life was seen as cheap in London, and the impermanence of present-day existence in this, the first decade of a brand-new century.
The sitting room, or parlour, smelled of camphor, lamp oil, and the carbolic soap that
Ratford’s women servants used for washing the stiff and irritating bed linen. Its two windows looked out onto the grey and dirty gable wall of the house next door, and down into a dingy courtyard where on a fair Monday the women would hang out the linen to dry.
In the parlour on that late afternoon sat three men, with Harry Judge outside on the impenetrable dark landing above the equally pitch-dark stairs. Spear sat upright and serious as he discussed their current employment problems with Terremant, who looked far too big for his chair, like a drum on a pea, Albert Spear thought with a smile he did not show. Sitting in the third chair, sprawling really, with legs outstretched, was young Glittering George Gittins, a big, friendly lad you would not wish to upset, with wide shoulders, smiling open face, bulging muscles, huge hands, and confidence obvious in his look, his eyes steady, his voice countrified, mixed up with a farmer’s burr and the speech of a man not often heard in the great metropolis of London town.
“As oi sees it,” he is saying as we join the trio off Lisle Street, “oi think the Professor aught ‘a be told, but we casn’t tell ’im till we’ve assured ourselves of the truth.” This was a long speech for George Gittins, and he was speaking about the main topic of their talk—the number of men, and women, once true to Professor Moriarty but now lapsed, having been snaffled by Idle Jack and sworn to his work.
“I’ve already told him,” Spear assured them.
“What? With numbers an’ all?” Terremant asked, taken aback by this news.
“Near as damnit. Far as we can tell.”
“And ‘ow did he take that, then?” asked young Gittins, open-mouthed, running a hand through the thick mane of hair that grew halfway down his back.
“What you’d call philosophically. He said we should look to the future, and start fighting back.”
“I’ll warrant he did.” Terremant gave a deep phlegmy chuckle.
“And that’s exactly what we’re going to do, beginning tonight.” Spear thumped his chair arm. “We’ll head out into the pubs and taverns, the sinks and the stews. We’ll seek out our former comrades and associates. Think what the Professor said the other day …”
