Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness (23 page)

‘That’s right,’ Ellie agreed.

‘Then there’s one fatal flaw to your argument. Lucy
didn’t
deny Jamie what he wanted!’

‘Are you saying that she slept with him?’

‘Several times, according to Jamie. Though he says they hadn’t done it since he got back from London.’

‘She
slept
with him!’

‘Why do you seem so shocked, Dr Carr? It’s not
that
unusual for such things to happen, you know. However much the churches might preach against it, and however often parents warn their daughters that it could ruin their lives for them, there’s still an awful lot of people in this world who simply can’t resist sampling the forbidden fruit.’

‘Oh my God,’ Ellie Can said softly to herself.

Five

Jamie Green had no idea what was happening to him. An hour earlier he’d been told he’d be released as soon as the paperwork had been completed. Now he was back in the interview room, which probably meant that he was about to be subjected to another round of questioning.

He wondered what had changed, then decided he didn’t really care what the answer was—didn’t really care about
anything
.

The door opened, and a woman walked into the room.

‘You must be Jamie,’ she said, smiling warmly.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Dr Carr, but you can call me Ellie.’

‘I don’t need a doctor,’ Jamie said sullenly.

‘Of course you don’t,’ Ellie agreed, sitting down in the chair opposite his. ‘But you could probably use a friendly ear.’

‘What?’

‘Someone to talk to. Someone to tell how you’re feeling. It must have been very hard to lose the girl you loved.’

‘It was hard,’ Jamie Green agreed, as tears began to stream down his cheeks again. ‘Not
was!
Is!
I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.’

‘I don’t think you will, either,’ Ellie said sympathetically. ‘But it won’t
always
be as bad as it is now. You’ll still carry the pain, but at least time will dull it a little.’ She paused for a moment. ‘I need to ask you some questions about what you and Lucy did together.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Superintendent Bullock tells me that you made love to her—on more than one occasion.’

‘He should never have told you that!’ Jamie said, as anger replaced sorrow on his face. ‘He had no right to.’

Ellie reached across the table and placed her hand on top of Jamie’s. The boy looked down at the two hands as if he did not quite understand what was going on, but he made no attempt to break free.

‘Superintendent Bullock
had
to
tell me, because I’m helping him to search for Lucy’s killer,’ Ellie said softly. ‘And why shouldn’t he have told me? I am a doctor, after all.’

‘I know, but—’

‘And I’m also a
woman
. I know the sort of temptation Lucy must have been under, because I’ve been under it myself.’

‘But you didn’t give way to it, did you?’ Jamie asked. ‘You were strong enough to resist! And that makes you feel as if you’re so much better than us.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Ellie told him. ‘I did give way.’

‘And were you the same age as Lucy?’

‘No, as a matter of fact, I was in my early twenties.’

‘Well, then...’

‘But age doesn’t really matter in these cases, Jamie. All that’s important is how you feel.’

‘Was he older than you—this man you gave in to?’

‘Yes. He was a senior doctor at the teaching hospital, and I was one of his students.’

He had told her he loved her, as she knew she loved him. He had promised her that they would marry, and that they would do their research together But he was already married and had no intention of sharing whatever glory his research might bring him with anyone else.

She was grateful, in a way, that it had happened, because it had taught her a valuable lesson early on. Now, when she slept with a man, it was solely for her own pleasure. And if she loved anything at all, it was her work.

‘How did you feel once you’d done it?’ Jamie asked.

She was tempted to tell him the truth, but she knew that the question was not about her at all—that he was asking her how she, as a woman, thought Lucy would have felt.

‘I was happier than I’d ever been before,’ she lied. ‘I was proud of having given myself to the man I loved.’

Jamie smiled gratefully. ‘So you
do
understand,’ he said.

Ellie nodded. ‘Before you slept with Lucy, were you a virgin yourself?’ she asked.

‘Yes. And I’m not ashamed of it!’

‘There’s no reason why you should be.’ But that might explain the discrepancy between his statement and the autopsy findings, Ellie thought.

‘Given your own inexperience, it’s entirely possible that you didn’t make love to Lucy after all,’ she continued.

‘I’m no liar!’

‘I’m sure you’re not. I know you
believe
you did it, but you may not have entirely succeeded.’

‘It was just like it should have been,’ Jamie said defiantly.

‘Why don’t you describe the first time to me?’

‘Because I don’t want to.’

‘I can understand that. You’re afraid that after you’ve described it, I won’t believe you.’

‘I don’t care whether you believe me or not.’

‘Or perhaps it’s not that at all. Perhaps you’re afraid that once you’ve heard yourself describe what went on, you won’t believe it either.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ Jamie asked, anguishedly.

‘It doesn’t really matter what actually happened, Jamie,’ Ellie told him. ‘You
wanted
to do it—and Lucy wanted to do it
with you
—so even if you didn’t get it quite right, that doesn’t make you any less of a man.’

‘You’ll keep on at me until you find out what you want to know, won’t you?’ Jamie asked.

‘Yes,’ Ellie agreed. ‘I’m afraid I have to.’

‘The first time we made love was in the stables. It...It was very hard to enter her at first...’

‘Go on.’

‘...and it seemed to be hurting her so much that I wanted to stop. But she told me to go on. So I did.’

‘Did she say she’d enjoyed it?’

‘Yes, she said she had—but I don’t think she was telling the truth.’

‘Why would she have lied?’

‘For me! She wanted me to think I’d made her happy.’

‘What about the second time?’

‘The second time it was a lot easier to get inside her, and once I was there, she moaned like I’d never heard a woman moan before.’

‘Let’s get back to the first time,’ Ellie suggested. ‘Was there any blood?’

‘I’d rather not say.’

‘But I need to know. And I think you need to know too.’

‘Know what?’

‘Whether you really did it properly. Because you’re still not
quite
sure, are you?’

‘I was until you walked into the room!’ Jamie said angrily. ‘I was before you started asking me all these questions.’

‘
Was
there
blood?
’ Ellie asked.

‘Yes, there was a lot of blood. I thought we must have done something wrong. I wanted to take her to the doctor right away. But Lucy said I mustn’t worry. She said it was
supposed
to be like that.’

*

‘Well, well, well, what a surprise!’ the madam of the house in Waterloo Road said, looking up from her chaise longue at the chubby young man who was standing, somewhat nervously, in front of her.

‘Surprise?’

‘I wasn’t expecting you to call round until some time this evening, yet it’s only just past noon, and here you are already.’ Patterson shifted his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other. ‘You didn’t say I should come in the
evening
,’ he pointed out. ‘You just said it should be some time today.’

‘That’s true enough, but the fact that you’re here
so
early shows just how eager you are, now doesn’t it?’

Patterson shrugged, as if he were pretending that he didn’t really care one way or the other. ‘You told me you had the girl and, since I happened to be in the area, I thought I might as well come to see her,’ he said unconvincingly.

‘You thought you’d come to “see” her, did you?’ the madam repeated, with amused contempt. ‘Well, before you “see” her, I’ll need to see the rest of the money. And I’m afraid the price has gone up.’

‘But we had a deal,’ Patterson protested.

‘You’re right, we did,’ the madam agreed. ‘But that deal was based on the understanding that I’d be providing a different class of girl from the one I’ve actually been able to lay my hands on. I promised you a tradesman’s daughter, didn’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, this girl’s much better than that.’

‘How is she better?’

‘She’s the daughter of a solicitor’s clerk. The poor man’s fallen on hard times, due to drink, but he took excellent care of his family before that. The girl’s been
very
well
brought up. She’ll never have dreamed she’d ever end up in a place like this.’ The madam leered. ‘I expect she’ll find what’s about to happen to her a great humiliation—and
very
frightening.’

‘How do I know you’re not lying about the girl?’ Patterson demanded.

‘Now I could take offence at that question,’ the madam told him, ‘but since I know you didn’t really mean to be rude, I won’t.’

‘I’ll still need an answer,’ Patterson said firmly.

‘All right. You can believe me because I’m an honest business woman, and I don’t lie.’

‘That’s not—’

‘You can also believe me because, when you meet the girl, it’ll be obvious what sort of background she comes from. And if that’s not enough for you, you can ask the girl yourself, just before you start “seeing” her.’

Patterson licked his lips. ‘How much extra will the new girl cost me?’ he asked.

‘Another fifty pounds.’

‘That seems...er...reasonable.’

‘Have you got the money on you at the moment, or will you need to go to the bank for it?’

‘I’ve got the money on me,’ Patterson said, reaching into his pocket and producing a thick wad of bank notes.

Now it was the madam who was licking her lips. ‘That’ll be seventy-five pounds,’ she said. ‘The girl costs a hundred, but I’ve remembered that you gave me twenty-five pounds as a deposit when you were here the other night. See how honest I am?’

‘Yes,’ Patterson replied. ‘You’re very honest. You’re a real credit to your profession.’

*

Superintendent Bullock was sitting at the desk in the office that the local police had assigned him. In front of him lay Ellie Carr’s report of the autopsy she’d performed on Lucy Stanford, which he had intended to read earlier but still hadn’t quite got round to.

The office door opened, and Ellie Carr herself walked in. She looked rather shaken, Bullock noted. Now why was that? Possibly it was because she’d just learned that conducting an interrogation was a harder slog than it might at first appear. Or perhaps it was because—during the course of the interrogation—she’d learned that she didn’t know quite as much about police work as she’d thought she did.

‘I’ve spoken to the boy,’ Ellie said, ‘and I believe he did exactly what he says he did.’

Bullock knew that now was not the right time to take a dig at her, but he found himself unable to resist the temptation. ‘So what price now your theory that Jamie might have killed Lucy because she wouldn’t let him have his wicked way with her?’ he said jovially.

‘Have you read my autopsy report?’ Ellie asked coldly.

‘No, not yet,’ Bullock admitted.

‘I thought not. Because if you had, you’d know that the girl I examined was a virgin.’

‘Come, come, Dr Carr; since we now both know that she can’t have been, it’s obvious you must have made a mistake.’

‘I don’t make mistakes,’ Ellie said.

‘Everybody makes mistakes.’

‘Not over matters as simple as that.’

‘But if you’re right...’

‘And I can assure you I am.’

‘...then, logically, there’s only one conclusion we can reach.’

‘Exactly’ Ellie agreed. ‘And that conclusion is that the girl I’ve just done the autopsy on
wasn’t
Lucy Stanford.’

Six

There were two men standing at the crown of the humpbacked bridge. One of them, Blackstone, was looking up the canal towards the Melbourne Mine. The other, Drayman, was pacing nervously back and forth.

‘Is there still no sign of the
Bluebell?
’ Drayman asked, for the fourth or fifth time.

‘No,’ Blackstone replied. ‘But I’d be surprised if there had been yet. According to the letter, it’s not even due for at least another hour.’

‘You talk about that letter as if it were Holy Writ!’ Drayman said. ‘But it’s not, is it? It’s an anonymous note, which could have been scrawled by just about anybody.’

Blackstone shook his head. ‘Not just about anybody. Whoever wrote it has to be very close to Bickersdale.’

‘I should never have agreed to any of this, Sam,’ Drayman said, as he continued to pace. ‘When it ends in a fiasco—as it’s almost bound to—we’re going to look complete bloody fools. But that won’t matter to you, because you’ll be long gone. I’m the one who has to continue to live here.’

‘It’s almost over,’ Blackstone told him. ‘Don’t lose your nerve now.

‘The more I think about it, the more your theory fails to add up,’ Drayman continued, as if Blackstone had never spoken. ‘You first started to believe that Lawrence Bickersdale had to be a jewel-smuggler when you saw how salt blocks were made. Isn’t that right?’

‘No, I started to believe it when I read the letter that Tom Yardley had sent me.’

‘But it was seeing the salt blocks that convinced you he’d been telling the truth?’

‘It certain explained why Bickersdale had chosen Marston as the centre of his operation.’

‘But, according to the anonymous letter you put so much faith in, the contraband’s being loaded up at the Melbourne Mine,’ Inspector Drayman pointed out.

‘I know.’

‘And they don’t
make
blocks of salt at the Melbourne Mine! They make them at the Jubilee Salt Works!’

‘I know that, too.’

‘So if Bickersdale really was involved in smuggling, then the trail would start from the salt
works
, not the salt
mine
.’

That flaw in the argument had been worrying Blackstone, too, though, given the fragile state of Inspector Drayman’s nerves, he thought it best not to show his concern.

‘Perhaps this particular piece of jewellery that they’re shifting is too big to go in a block of salt,’ he suggested.

‘Too big! And just what kind of jewellery is too big to go in a block of salt?’ Drayman asked derisively ‘Perhaps it’s the Queen’s coronation crown he’s fencing, though I can’t say that I remember reading any reports of it actually being stolen.’

‘Maybe it’s bars of gold he’s smuggling.’

‘You’re clutching at straws,’ Drayman said. ‘Face it, Sam: your entire theory is built upon a foundation stone of salt blocks, and if you once remove them, the whole structure comes tumbling down. Which is why I’m afraid that if we
do
stop that boat, we’ll find nothing on it. Which is why I think that by the end of the day we’ll both have very red faces.’

He was wrong, Blackstone thought. He
had
to
be
wrong. Because Tom Yardley would never have written that letter if he hadn’t been seriously worried. Because Tom would never have been murdered—and Mick Huggins would never have dared to try and kill a police inspector from Scotland Yard—if there’d been nothing to hide. Because the anonymous letter-writer had been spot on with his first piece of information, so why should he be wrong with the second? But, most important of all, Blackstone knew that Drayman was wrong because his
gut
told him he was.

A uniformed constable came running up the bridge, waving an envelope in his hand. At the crown he came to a halt, caught his breath, then said, ‘Telegram for you, Inspector Blackstone. It’s marked “Urgent”.’

Blackstone took the telegram from him, slit open the envelope, and saw that the message was from Ellie Carr. ‘LATEST VICTIM OF KILLER DEFINITELY NOT LUCY STANFORD, DESPITE FACT FOUND WEARING LUCY’S CLOTHES,’ Ellie had written: ‘BULLOCK BAFFLED. ME BAFFLED. ANY IDEAS? IF SO, PLEASE SEND SOONEST.’

Despite the seriousness of the telegram’s contents, Blackstone found that he was smiling. The telegram sounded so much like the way Ellie spoke that she could almost have been there, he thought—and then he realized that he really wished she was.

*

The girl was waiting for Patterson in a room on the second floor of the house in Waterloo Road. She was sitting on a chair, in the corner, as if she felt that being close to two walls gave her some kind of protection. She was small and very pale, and the elaborate lace chemise in which they’d dressed her seemed hideously inappropriate for a child like her.

‘Are you the one?’ she asked Patterson, with fear in her eyes and a tremble in her voice.

‘The one what?’ the sergeant asked.

‘The one who they told me downstairs was coming to make me into a woman?’

Patterson felt sick to his stomach. ‘I’m not going to do anything at all to you,’ he promised. ‘I won’t even touch you. All I want to do is ask you a few questions. Would that be all right?’

The girl, still plainly terrified, just nodded.

Patterson squatted down, so that his face was level with hers, and then smiled as reassuringly as he was able.

‘Where do you live?’ he asked softly.

‘Here. They told me downstairs that from now on, I live here.’

‘Where did you live
before
they brought you here?’

‘In a cheap boarding house. Down by the docks.’

‘On your own?’

‘No. With my father.’

‘And before even that?’

A smile—infinitely sad and infinitely wistful—came over the girl’s face. ‘We had a nice house in Holloway,’ she said. ‘It had a lovely garden for me to play in.’

‘And what happened? Why did you move?’

‘Mother died, and Father started drinking. When he lost his job, we had to leave the house.’

‘Does he still drink?’

‘Worse than ever. That’s why he said I should come and live with the lady. He said she’d take good care of me.’

‘Do you think it was because she could look after you that he agreed to let the lady take you away?’

The girl shook her head, and a small tear trickled down her cheek.

‘Then why
did
he agree?’ Patterson asked.

‘I think it was because the lady gave him a ten-pound note.’

‘Where’s this lady now?’

‘Downstairs.’

He’d heard as much as he needed to, Patterson decided—or, at any rate, as much as he could
take
.

He walked over to the window, drew back the curtain and looked down into the road. He saw a street-cleaner standing there, though the man was making no effort to sweep the street and seemed much more interested in watching the house.

Patterson waved to him. The man nodded, and moved his cart along.

Another two minutes passed before there was a sound of pounding feet in the street and, looking out of the window again, the sergeant could see half a dozen uniformed policemen running towards the house.

Patterson opened the bedroom door, and stepped out into the corridor.

‘Where are you going?’ the girl asked, alarmed by the thought that this man—who had been so nice—was now about to abandon her.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a minute,’ Patterson assured her, ‘but I really do need to find you something a bit more decent to wear.’