Sunday morning
Hildy went to bed after sitting up with him for a half hour or more, but Inspector Tipple gave up on sleep altogether.
He thought a change of pace might freshen his thoughts on the Harker affair, so he sat down at his desk and pulled out files from different cases. Perusing other problems should jog his intuition and grant him a new perspective. After all, the technique had worked in the past.
However, Horace saw only the details that reminded him of the murderer who’d slipped through his fingers – was that only the day before yesterday? – and one of the case files even included a suspect sketch done by Lewis Todd. There was no mistaking that boy’s handiwork, even if the drawing wasn’t signed, and Horace dropped the file on his desk with a sigh.
Ignoring the matter of Nicholas Harker and Lewis Todd – and Lewis’s friend, the vicar – was impossible. In the night’s silence, he could almost hear them begging to be found.
The telephone rang; Horace nearly started out of his chair at the jarring shrill.
He snatched the receiver from its hook before the second ring (poor Hildy) and leaned toward the call box, which was fastened to the wall above his desk.
“Sir,” came the clipped greeting. Of course it was one of Horace’s policemen: no one else would be calling at half-past three on a Sunday morning. He recognized the voice of Sergeant John Nolan.
“Sorry to wake you, sir,” Nolan went on, “but you asked that we ring you if anything further developed.”
“Do tell.”
What the sergeant then related had Horace Tipple at the station by four o’clock.
Nolan greeted him at the door and together they walked up to the first floor, the station still busy despite the early hour. (After all, a manhunt for a murderer was underway, and a brother policeman was missing.) Nolan was a steady, sturdy fellow not much younger than Horace; they began speaking as soon as they reached a table to one side of the floor’s open expanse. The bobbies who’d been clustered about it made way when the detective drew near.
“The coroner did confirm the identity of the body, sir.” The sergeant said, handing a sketch he’d taken from one of several sheaves of paper on the tabletop to the inspector.
Horace looked at the drawing (yet another one of Lewis’s) and frowned. “Frank O’Malley. He’s been a person of interest?”
Nolan nodded. “Sergeant Todd put together a folio of all the Harkers and their prime lackeys as they figured into the case since we had photographs of only a few. He sketched O’Malley when the chap insisted on coming forward as a character witness for Nicholas Harker.”
“Ah, yes,” Horace nodded. “I remember hearing of his vehement determination…. He wasn’t a material witness, though, was he?”
“No. He was in a pub in Bethnal Green at the time of the murder. But he was Harker’s impromptu guardian after the boy’s mother died several years ago and was adamant the young man couldn’t have killed anyone, let alone one of the family’s chief underworld competitors. Of all the family’s proclamations of the boy’s innocence, O’Malley’s were the most vigorous.”
“And now he’s dead.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Cause of death?”
“The coroner says it’s the same manner and method used by Nicholas Harker to kill Milo Gervais: a throat cut by a heavy knife.”
While that methodology itself wasn’t particularly unique, the style of the knife stroke had been. On account of it (and with the help of a mortician who kept extensive notes), Horace had been able to link Gervais’s murder with several others, all of which formed the foundation of his case against Nicholas Harker and the Harker empire as a whole.
Before he voiced what he found so glaringly problematic about Mr. O’Malley’s death, Horace asked, “Where was the body?”
“Constable Little interrupted a group of men attempting to dump it in the river off Nightingale, sir,” a plainclothes detective sergeant, Eustace Bradtree, chimed in. Missing one of his front teeth, Bradtree whistled a bit when he said his S’s. “They fled as soon as they heard his shout, but they hadn’t finished their work.”
“Little is one of Sergeant Todd’s men?” Horace asked, almost absently, as he turned to the large, detailed map of the East End tacked to the wall behind him.
“Yes, sir. He helped Lewis put that folio together, so he recognized O’Malley and asked the coroner to speed his work,” Bradtree whistled. “Only brought the body in a few hours ago. Seems to have been dead about a day. Also, the abandoned cart was found in a nameless alley near Sheridan Street.”
“We’re certain that cart is linked to the case?” The inspector half-turned back toward his men.
“As we can be, sir.” Bradtree nodded to a mud-smudged police helmet sitting on the table amid the paperwork and other odds-and-ends. “That was stashed in the back. Has Sergeant Todd’s name inked in the lining.”
Horace nodded and turned back to the map. He located Nightingale Lane where it brushed the Thames on the map and chewed his lip in thought.
The Harkers had holdings throughout the East End (if primarily in Whitechapel): they were highlighted on this map, as was the trail of the false police wagon in which Nicholas Harker had escaped from Holloway Prison, and the side street where the abandoned cart had been found an hour or two before. The alley where Lewis Todd had presumably disappeared and the Clerkenwell police station were also marked.
Holloway, Clerkenwell, and the Old Bailey were a few miles to the northwest of Whitechapel on the other side of the Old City. The police wagon’s path had been traced as far as central Whitechapel before it petered to nothing somewhere between Turner Street and Raven near London Hospital.
The five points were nowhere near each other and bore no noticeable relationship to any of the Harker properties.
Not allowing the map’s inconclusiveness to drive him to frustration, Horace turned back to his men. “Are all the Harkers’ holdings on this map? Current and past?”
Sergeant Nolan thought for a moment in his plodding, steady way. “Current, yes sir, and we have as many men as possible keeping an eye on them with assistance from J, N, and K divisions. We didn’t mark some of the Harkers’ old premises – which we’re also not watching – such as that burned out factory in Bethnal Green, the warehouses in St. George’s they sold to MacDermott Incorporated last autumn, or the abandoned tunnels some fool of a Harker dug in the sixties to meet up with the West End Underground.”
“Why not the last? Seems an excellent place in which to hole-up.”
Detective Sergeant Bradtree chimed in again. “Most of that was taken over by developing sewer lines, bricked in, or absorbed as lower levels of existing street-level structures and walled off from the rest of the tunnel system. I’ve heard what’s left in the Harkers’ asset portfolio is a series of isolated labyrinths, numbering perhaps a dozen or more. Very difficult to access discreetly, though doable with aid. Also, problematic for us to monitor.”
Horace chewed his lip some more. “Has the coroner stated whether he might be able to determine where our deceased has been recently?”
Nolan and Bradtree looked at each other.
“I’ll ask him, sir,” Bradtree whistled for the both of them.
“Very well. Also, consider where a fugitive might find the means to hide himself, as well as enjoy the ability to enter and exit with relative ease without alerting the public.”
Several heads around the table nodded.
“Now,” Horace said, returning to one of the many and multiplying issues that bothered him, “why do you think Harker would kill – rather, personally execute – one of his greatest supporters only two days after escaping police custody?”
* * * * *
“Stop.”
At first, the priest thought he’d spoken without meaning to. But his lips hadn’t moved from their frozen grimace, and he hadn’t the breath to speak anyway.
“S-stop!”
Someone pushed between David and his attackers, repeating the stuttering injunction a third time. For a time, the second thug had held the priest steady for the other to strike; then the second fellow had released him to have a go as well. David had sunk down on his haunches and huddled against the wall with his eyes closed; from this position, now, the priest couldn’t tell who the newcomer was.
The battering stopped.
“Move yer arse, y’bloody fool,” the first thug snarled.
“N-no! No!” The newcomer’s words were a cross between a command and a plea; at the same time, David felt himself wrapped in gentle embrace.
“Why you—!”
“—Venn!” The second thug cut the first off sharply. “Boss says we can’t touch ‘im.”
The first – whose name was apparently Venn – grumbled most vehemently at this, but (to David’s surprise) he respected both the newcomer’s wishes and the second thug’s reminder.
After a moment, David opened his eyes – one was nearly swelled shut – and saw Innocent’s face only a few inches from his own.
“Thank you,” the priest murmured. Split and bleeding though his lips were, he managed to speak coherently. Innocent beamed in response.
The young man helped David stand. His body screamed quite unhappily at this, but the priest was pleased to note none of his new pains shrilled with the sharpness of broken bones.
Small mercy.
The fair-haired chap returned a minute or two later, and the two thugs crowded David against the wall again. With Innocent at his shoulder, the only violence the two directed toward him were hostile looks (the third thug still seemed as bored as ever).
A new fellow who’d accompanied the blonde into the room completely arrested David’s attention.
This chap was no taller than the priest himself, of a slight but sturdy build, and dressed in the long, loose shirt and baggy, straight-legged trousers of the Orient. The fellow’s face was a round collection of lines and wrinkles, his eyes were an impassive almond in both shape and color, and the hair that straggled out from beneath a squashed felt cap was uniformly white.
In silence, the old man knelt down next to Lewis, who was deathly still in the lamplight’s glow…though David could still hear him wheezing ever so faintly.
Every person in the room – even the bored thug – was riveted by the sight of the little foreigner as he transformed the room into an impromptu surgery.
Over the course of the next hour or so (David couldn’t be certain how long), the old man worked over the policeman with long-nailed, deft fingers. When he finally finished, Lewis was rather bloodied, but his breathing was noticeably stronger, less labored, and his face no longer bluish.
That the blonde had indeed brought a doctor to fix his friend shocked the priest, as did the exchange the little foreigner and the fair-haired fellow had as the former made to leave.
As the old man moved to the door, he paused, caught the leader’s arm, and began to speak to the fellow in what sounded to David like Mandarin. David had yet to learn any of the languages from the Orient, but he had little doubt he would should they ever escape their current predicament. Even now, though, he was able to understand the gist of the conversation that passed between the two men.
It seemed the old fellow was chastising the blond thug for something (perhaps for what had been done to Lewis?), and the thug hung his head briefly in acknowledgment.
If this surprised David, hearing the blonde respond in the same language – albeit with an unmistakably east London accent – did so even more. Whatever he said seemed to mollify the old man, who then departed.
As the blonde, whose face was impassive but whose eyes were introspective, nodded for his lackeys to leave, Innocent spoke up.
“I is s-s-s-stayin’.”
The blond fellow gave him a hard look, but shrugged and left without further ado, the three other thugs accompanying him and taking the lantern as they left.
The light dimmed back to what shown through the wall slit as the door slammed shut behind them; David stood against the wall for a moment before starting toward his friend.
He staggered once; Innocent steadied him. The priest was dimly curious about where Innocent had been all day, but curiosity could wait. He had a promise to keep.
Kneeling down by his friend, the little clergyman bowed his head and closed his eyes and began to speak the words Lewis had asked for.
Languages came so easily to David. He’d never thought his talent anything special until he’d been to seminary in Rome. There, surrounded by students from many other countries, he discovered other tongues making sense to him within weeks of an initial introduction. By the end of his first term, he’d been passably conversant in a half-dozen languages beside his own, and genuinely fluent in those same half-dozen by the end of the year. Italian, French, German, Spanish – in addition to the Latin and Greek required by his studies – were his in so little time that even his professors began to wonder.
Their awe had made him uncomfortable, so he’d brushed it away by saying he’d received extensive training as a child – only partially true. One of his teachers, however, had encouraged him to recognize his gift as just that, so David had revised his perception and learned to relish and share his skill with communication.
Now, some 10 years after his professor had encouraged him, David was fluent in a full dozen languages, conversant in twice that many dialects, and still absorbing another five or so new tongues. This gift was one of the cornerstones of the school he was trying to establish.
As he said the words of the prayer, though, it was as if David were speaking a language he’d forgotten.
He knew the words had meaning, but as the words of the sacrament passed from his lips into the still air of the room, that meaning escaped him. For a moment, he tried to hold onto them, to yank their importance back so he could understand again, but he gave up.
The words weren’t for him in any case.
When he finished, David rested for a moment with his head still bowed, aching.
“A’ yer a p-p-pries’?”
David looked up, confused for a moment. The movement made the room spin.
“Yes – why yes, I am,” he mumbled, realizing then that Innocent had never seen him in his clerics.
The room whirled faster.
Maybe he should lie down for a moment, David thought woozily. After all, he’d slept only an hour or two since...was it the night before last?
Innocent said something further, but the priest couldn’t make out what it was, what with his pulse a thundering, all-consuming tempo in his ears.
The room tilted sideways.
Then everything went black.
* * * * *