Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness (12 page)

Three

‘If you ever behave in that way again, I’ll not only kick you off this case, I’ll see to it personally that you never get anywhere near another Metropolitan Police investigation,’ Superintendent Bullock said, as he bundled Ellie Carr out of the main door of Walsingholme Manor.

‘If
I
behave in that way again,’ Ellie asked angrily, breaking free of his grip. ‘What about the way that
you
behaved?’

‘I had to do
something
,’ Bullock told her. ‘It doesn’t do to make an enemy of a man like Sir John Walsingholme.’

‘Are you afraid it might damage your promotion prospects?’ Ellie asked, sneeringly.

‘No, I’m afraid he might use his influence to have
me
taken off this case!’ Bullock countered.

‘Would that be such a loss?’ Ellie demanded, still furious. ‘You haven’t exactly made a great deal of progress so far, have you?’

‘No,’ Bullock admitted, his fury matching her own. ‘But at least I know the ins-and-outs of the case now, and if there’s a lead to be found, I might recognize it for what it is. Could you say the same about anybody else coming in from the outside and starting from scratch?’

The logic of his argument made Ellie Carr feel as if she had suddenly been doused with a pail of icy water.

‘You’re right,’ she said, calmer now. ‘You’re the best man to lead the investigation.’

‘So now you understand why I had to remove you before you could do any more damage?’

‘Yes, and I’m sorry that my actions in there have made your life more difficult for you.’

‘You only did what you thought was right,’ Bullock said, somewhat mollified. ‘You only wanted to catch the killer.’

They walked over to the pony and trap, almost friends again. ‘But I really
do
need to see that body,’ Ellie said, as she climbed into the passenger seat.

‘I thought I’d already made it plain to you that that simply isn’t possible,’ Bullock replied.

‘Can’t you get some sort of warrant from the local Justice of the Peace?’ Ellie wondered. ‘Whatever his personal feelings—and whatever he told us a few minutes ago—Sir John would have to respect that.’

A smile, which could have been bitter and could have been darkly amused—and was probably both—came to Bullock’s lips.

‘And you think that the local JP would give us such a warrant, do you?’ he asked.

‘I don’t see why he wouldn’t, once we’ve explained the necessity of it to him,’ Ellie said earnestly.

‘Oh, don’t you? I wonder if you’ll still think that way when I tell you the JP’s name.’

‘It’s Sir John Walsingholme, isn’t it?’ Ellie asked.

‘That’s right,’ Bullock agreed. ‘It’s Sir John Walsingholme.’

*

‘Name?’ the booking sergeant at Northwich Police Station demanded. The big man with a scar on his cheek glowered down at him.

‘It shouldn’t be me that’s here,’ he said.

‘It’s that other bastard you should have arrested. He nearly broke my soddin’ knee.’

‘Only after you tried to rearrange his face with a broken glass,’ the sergeant said, unsympathetically. ‘Now, for the second time of asking, tell me what your name is.’

‘Mick Huggins,’ the prisoner said, sullenly.

‘Michael Huggins,’ the sergeant said, writing the name down in his ledger. ‘Address?’

‘Haven’t got one.’

‘So you’re homeless?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Huggins replied, grinning as if this were a game he had played a hundred times, but never tired of.

‘You just told me that you don’t have any address,’ the sergeant said impatiently.

‘So I did. But I’ve still got a home. I’m a narrowboat man. I live on my barge.’

*

Blackstone stood at the crown of the humpbacked bridge, in the village that had been raised on salt—in all senses of the word—and sometimes sank because of it, too. Ahead of him lay one of the mines, and beyond that the church and the school. Behind him were the houses and more mines.

There was no escaping salt, he thought. Even this bridge was not free of it, for the Jubilee Salt Works had been built right alongside it, and, at its upper level, actually opened on to the bridge.

He turned to walk back down the bridge, and saw that a man—stripped down to his vest and enveloped in steam—was standing at the open salt-works doors and watching him.

‘Are you that Mr Blackstone?’ the man asked.

‘I don’t think I know you,’ Blackstone replied cautiously.

‘No more you do,’ the man agreed. ‘I’m Ted Littler. I’m a mate of Walter Clegg’s. An’
you
, unless I’m very much mistaken, were an army mate of Tom Yardley’s.’

‘That’s right,’ Blackstone said.

‘He was a good man.’

‘One of the best.’

There was a pause, as there sometimes is when men who don’t know each other have run out of things to say.

Then Ted Littler spoke again. ‘Do you want to come inside, and have a look around?’

Blackstone shrugged. Littler may have offered the invitation as nothing more than a way of breaking the awkward silence, but now it had been made, it would seem impolite to refuse it.

‘Yes, I’d like to,’ he said.

Littler led him through the double doors into a room that was so steamy it would have put a Turkish baths to shame. The room was dominated by a huge metal pan—Blackstone guessed it was at least sixty feet long—which was made of large iron plates bolted together. And in the pan was a bubbling milky liquid which was responsible for all the steam.

‘That’s brine,’ Ted Littler explained. ‘Do you know what brine is, Mr Blackstone?’

‘A mixture of salt and water?’

‘That’s right. We pump the water into the ground, and it dissolves the salt and makes brine. Then we pump the brine out again, and heat it up to boiling point in this pan. And when the water evaporates, what we’re left with is salt. It’s almost like magic, isn’t it?’

If it was, it was a very sticky sort of magic, Blackstone thought, for though he’d been standing there for less than a minute, he was already starting to sweat heavily and had the tang of salt on his tongue.

There were several other men, besides Littler, working on the pan, and Blackstone found himself watching them with a growing fascination.

The main tool of their trade appeared to be an almost-flat sieve on the end of a long pole. The men skimmed these sieves through the milky solution, then lifted them clear of the surface and held them there while the liquid drained away. That done, they swung the sieves clear of the pan and tipped their contents into wooden moulds, which were around two feet long and nine inches square.

‘That salt would strip the flesh off your bones right now,’ Littler said, obviously pleased that Blackstone was taking an interest. ‘But by the time it’s cooled down in the moulds, it’ll have turned as hard as a brick. So the next time you see a block of salt resting on the shelf of your local shop, just remember all the effort that’s gone into makin’ it.’

‘I will,’ Blackstone promised.

‘Funny thing, isn’t it?’ Ted Littler continued. ‘I’ve never been out of Cheshire myself, but the salt that I make in here travels all the way round the world. Take the blocks you’ve just seen us making. They might go no further than Manchester, but it’s just as likely they could be in South Africa a month from now.’

Blackstone said nothing, but he was doing some rapid thinking. Ever since he’d arrived in this village, he’d been asking himself why a jewel-smuggling ring would ever base itself here. And now he thought he had the answer.

*

The King Charles’s Arms was the most convenient pub for the boarding house at which Ellie Carr and Jed Trent were staying, but even from the outside it was obvious to Trent that it was a rough-and-ready place.

‘Why don’t we see if there’s somewhere a little more salubrious further down the road,’ he suggested.

‘There’s no need to,’ Ellie replied firmly. ‘This place will serve our needs perfectly well.’

Trent had begun to learn to distinguish between the times when there was some point in arguing with Ellie and the times when there wasn’t, and judging this to be one of the latter times he merely shrugged and said, ‘On your own head be it then, Dr Carr.’ He opened the door to the saloon bar and gestured her inside.

Ellie looked around her.

‘Changed your mind?’ Trent asked over his shoulder.

‘Not at all,’ Ellie said. ‘You find us a nice table, Jed, and I’ll get the drinks in.’

‘There are no “nice” tables,’ Trent told her. ‘And if anybody’s getting the drinks in, I think it had better be me.’

But he was speaking to empty air, because Ellie was already striding towards the bar counter.

‘We don’t serve women,’ the landlord said, speaking to her, but looking over her head.

‘That’s all right, I don’t want to buy one,’ Ellie said cheerily. ‘But what I
would
like is a pint of your best bitter and a large port and lemon.’

‘Listen, love—’ the landlord began.

‘I’m not your love now, nor do I ever consider it a very likely—or enjoyable prospect,’ Ellie interrupted him.

‘You what?’

‘Look at me!’ Ellie said.

For a second the landlord resisted, then he slowly lowered his eyes until they were resting on her.

‘What you have to ask yourself is whether or not it’s worth the trouble to refuse to serve me,’ Ellie said. ‘Or, to put it another way, how much trouble do you think I could cause if I
don’t
get served?’

She wasn’t that big, the landlord thought, but she was scrappy. And she looked as if she’d rather lose a leg than give way now.

‘A pint of bitter an’ a port an’ lemon, you said, didn’t you?’ he asked.

‘That’s right,’ Ellie agreed.

As she took the drinks over to the table that Jed had found for them, she discovered that she was angry. But not angry with the landlord. She’d never really been angry with him.

‘That’s the trouble with you,’ Jed said, when she sat down.

‘What is?’

‘If you can’t fight the battles you want to fight, you’ll fight any battles that happen to come to hand.’

He was right, of course. She recognized now that she’d picked this pub deliberately, because she’d been looking for trouble as a way of relieving the frustration that had been eating away at her. But she couldn’t help it! She’d always been a fighter, and that was why—despite her background—she’d ended up as a medical researcher rather than a flower girl.

‘It’s the bleedin’ injustice of it wot gets me,’ she said, not even noticing that she was slipping back into the Cockney of her childhood.

‘What injustice are you talking about?’ Jed Trent said.

‘The injustice of there being one law in this country for the rich—and quite another law for the poor. If Emma Walsingholme had been a domestic servant or a milkmaid, her dad wouldn’t even have been
told
that I was going to perform an autopsy. The body would just have been delivered to the nearest morgue, and that would have been that.’

‘That’s possibly true, but—’ Jed Trent began.

‘But because her bleedin’ dad’s got a title—and an estate that it would take you half a day to walk round—I’ve been told I can’t even get near her. It makes me sick to my stomach, Jed.’

‘Put yourself in her father’s place.’

‘I’m not here to put myself in his place. That’s his clergyman’s job.
I’m
here to examine the body of his daughter. I’m here to come up with information that might possibly prevent more murders.’

‘Oh, is that why you’re getting so het up?’

‘Of course it is!’

‘And it has nothing at all to do with the fact that you
always
get frustrated when somebody blocks you from furthering your own research?’

‘There may be a bit of that to it as well,’ Ellie admitted, a little guiltily. ‘But that’s not to say I don’t want to help catch this madman. I really
do
want to do that!’

‘I know you do.’

Ellie thought for a moment. ‘If we could just learn where they’re keeping the body until the funeral, we could probably find a way to break into the place, and—’

‘No!’ Trent said forcefully.

‘You’ve no need to worry. However much I might want to cut her open, I wouldn’t. I’d just
look
at the body.’

‘The answer’s still no.’

Ellie gave Trent a black look. ‘You do work for me, you know. It’s not the other way around.’

‘I work for the University College Hospital,’ Trent pointed out. ‘But even if you
were
the one who paid my wages, I still wouldn’t let you do a crazy thing like that.’

Ellie Carr sighed. ‘You’re probably right,’ she agreed. ‘Breaking into the house would be going too far—even for me. So we’ll just have to hope we get more co-operation the next time, won’t we?’