Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Burton & Swinburne) (11 page)

How many others?
Burton thought.
How many have become something they should never have been?

The growler turned left onto Vauxhall Bridge and joined the queue of vehicles waiting to pay the toll to cross.

“The devil take it!” Trounce grumbled. “For how long are we to sit here breathing in this funk?”

“I can barely see a thing,” Swinburne said, leaning out and peering ahead. “There's no telling how far from the toll booths we are. Surely, Pouncer, you don't expect us to fly rotorchairs in this?”

“Oy!” the police officer objected. “Don't call me Pouncer! But you're right, of course. After all that fresh Yorkshire air, I forgot how damned impenetrable these London particulars can be.”

Burton made a suggestion: “It's only a couple of miles to the Yard. Why don't we leg it there and borrow penny-farthings instead?”

Trounce agreed, and moments later they were crossing the bridge on foot, cursing the stink, cursing the traffic, and cursing the fog.

“I tell you, Captain, I'll be delighted to leave this bloody cesspool of a city behind for a few months,” Trounce declared.

It was six o'clock by the time they reached Ilford, and, though the fog was thinner there, the daylight was fading and the ill-lit town was wreathed in gloom.

They steered their velocipedes along the Cranbrook Road, then turned left into Grenfell Place.

“We're looking for number sixteen,” Trounce said.

A minute later, they found it: an isolated house set back from the road and concealed by a gnarled and unnaturally twisted oak tree.

“By Jove!” Trounce exclaimed. “Why would anyone want this monstrosity in their front garden?”

They opened the gate, passed through, ducked under the branches, and walked along the path to the front door. No lights were showing in the house.

Trounce exercised the door knocker with his usual vigour but was met with nothing but silence.

“This is a murder investigation,” he said, taking two steps back, “so I have no qualms about breaking in. Stand aside, would you, while I put my shoulder to it.”

Burton held up a hand. “No need for that, old chap.” He produced a picklock from his coat pocket and went to work on the keyhole. Moments later, there was a click.

“Open sesame!” Swinburne commanded, with an effusive wave of his arms.

“Go back to the gate and stand guard, would you, Algy?” Burton asked. “We'll need to light lamps, and if our strangler returns while we're here and sees the windows blazing, he'll do a runner before we've a chance to nab him. Yell if you see anyone acting in a suspicious manner.”

The poet nodded and moved away while Burton and Trounce entered the house. The Scotland Yard man took out a box of lucifers, struck one, and put it to a wall lamp in the hallway. It illuminated three doors and a flight of stairs.

The first door opened onto a small lounge. Trounce got another lamp going and the two men saw five chairs positioned around a coffee table on which ashtrays and empty glasses stood.

“It looks like there was a meeting of some sort,” Burton observed. He checked a bureau and found it empty, then the cupboards of an armoire and found the same.

The second door led to a dining room in which they found nothing of interest, and the third door into a kitchen. Its pantry was empty.

“I fear our quarry is long gone,” Trounce muttered.

The bedrooms upstairs added weight to his suspicion, for the wardrobes were bare and there were no personal possessions to be found anywhere.

“Let's take another look at the lounge,” Burton suggested.

They returned to that room and began a thorough search of it. The king's agent picked through the ashtrays, lifting cigar butts to his nose.

“Revealing,” he murmured. “Four different Germanic brands and one English.”

“Look at this, Captain.”

Burton moved over to where his friend was squatting by the fireplace.

Trounce pointed at a reddish-brown patch at the back of the hearth. “Is that dried blood?”

Burton crouched and examined the stain. “Yes, I think so. Well spotted. But how the blazes did blood get there?” He thought for a moment, then said: “Would you call Algy in, please?”

Trounce grunted, straightened, and left the room. While he was gone, Burton pulled the ashes and half-burned coals out of the fireplace and pushed them to one side, careless of the mess he made on the hearthrug. He lifted out the grate and set that aside, too.

“There was a hansom outside,” Swinburne said as he entered the room with Trounce behind him. “It trotted past in the normal manner. I don't think it was anything untoward. What's happening here?”

“You're the chimney expert,” Burton said. “Have a look at this.”

Swinburne cast his eyes over the fireplace. “It was recently cleaned,” he noted.

“It was?”

“Yes. Look how thin the layer of soot is. Is that a bloodstain?”

“We think so.”

“Give me your lantern, Richard.”

Burton reached into his pocket and pulled out his clockwork lantern. He shook it open and wound it, then handed it over to his assistant.

Swinburne removed his topper and laid it on the coffee table, then ducked down, stepped into the fireplace, and raised the light into the chimney.

“I'm going up,” he said, and, bracing his legs against either side of the opening, he began to climb.

“Be careful, lad!” Trounce cautioned.

“Don't worry,” Burton said. “Vincent Sneed trained him well.”

“Don't mention that cad!” came Swinburne's hollow voice. “I say! There's a sort of niche up here and a little stash of food. There are more bloodstains, too. I'm going to go all the way up to the roof.”

Little showers of soot fell into the hearth, but less than Burton would have expected; evidently the poet was correct, and the chimney was fairly clean.

Five minutes passed, then scrapes and trickles of black dust and an occasional grunt indicated that Swinburne was on his way back down. His feet appeared, then the poet in his entirety, his clothes and skin blackened, his green eyes sparkling from his sooty face.

“My guess is that a chimney sweep was hired to clean the chimney then came back later to steal food from the house,” he said. “It's not uncommon. Most of the boys are half-starved and those that lodge with master sweeps are often so brutalised that they occasionally seek refuge for a night in suitable chimneys.”

“Suitable chimneys?” Trounce asked. “What constitutes a suitable chimney?”

Swinburne turned off the lantern and handed it back to Burton. “One like this, with a niche in it and a shelf wide enough for the nipper to sleep on.”

“And the blood?” Burton asked.

“They shot him.”

“What?”

“Halfway up there's a furrow in the brickwork with a bullet lodged at the end of it. That shot obviously missed. Another one didn't. There's blood smeared all the way to the top and a lot of it on the roof tiles. The lad got away by the looks of it, but I doubt he survived for long, the poor little blighter.”

The three men were silent for a moment, then Swinburne said quietly: “And now I hate that Prussian swine even more.”

They made a final search of the house in case they'd missed anything then turned off the lights, stepped out, and closed the front door behind them.

“I'll report to the Yard and will have a couple of constables sent over to keep watch on the place,” Trounce said as they proceeded down the path.

“We have no choice but to leave the investigation in the hands of your colleagues now,” Burton said, “which means even if they catch the wretch, we won't hear about it for some considerable time. There is, however, one last thing I can do.”

“What?”

The king's agent pulled open the gate and they crossed to where their velocipedes were parked.

“I can visit the Beetle. He may know something about the injured sweep.”

They started the penny-farthings' engines, mounted, and set off. As they turned back into Cranbrook Road and began to chug down the hill, Burton called, “We'll split up when we get to Mile End. I'll head off to Limehouse. Algy, you go home, get packed, and have a good night's sleep. Stay off the alcohol. Trounce, do what you have to do at the Yard then get yourself home to your wife. We'll reconvene at the
Orpheus
tomorrow morning.”

This arrangement was followed, and just under an hour later, Burton was striding through the stifling fog along the banks of Limehouse Cut canal. The factories that lined it had finished production for the day, and the thousands of workers who toiled within them had dispersed, returning to their lodgings in the loathsome slum that was London's East End—or “the Cauldron” as it was more commonly known.

Burton had left his velocipede in the charge of a constable back on the High Road. It wouldn't do to bring such an expensive vehicle into this district. He'd left his top hat with the policeman, too. The men in this area were most often bare-headed or wore flat caps. Best not to stand out.

The king's agent did, however, carry his sword cane—with its silver panther-head handle—held in such a manner so as to be able to quickly unsheathe the blade should it become necessary.

He arrived at a towering factory that, unlike the others, stood derelict. Nearly every one of its windows was cracked or broken, and its doors were boarded up. He circled around it until he came to a narrow dock at the side of the canal. In a niche in the building's wall, he found iron rungs set into the brickwork. He climbed them.

The edifice was seven storeys high, and by the time Burton reached the roof, he was breathing heavily. Hauling himself over the parapet, he sat and rested a moment.

There were two skylights set into the flat roof with eight chimneys rising around them. The third one from the eastern edge had rungs set into its side, and, after the king's agent had got his breath back, he began to ascend it. Halfway up, he stopped to rest again, then pressed on until he came to the top of the structure. He swung himself onto the lip of the chimney and sat with one leg to either side of it. He'd picked up a number of stones on his way here, and now he retrieved three of them from his pocket and dropped them one by one into the flue. This signal would summon the Beetle.

Burton had never actually seen the strange leader of the League of Chimney Sweeps. All he knew about him was that he was a boy, he lived in this chimney, and he had a voracious appetite for books. The Beetle had been of significant help during the strange affair of Spring Heeled Jack, when he'd arranged for Swinburne to pose as a sweep—a move that led directly to the exposure of Darwin and his cronies—and since then Burton had visited regularly, always bringing with him a supply of literature and poetry. The Beetle was especially desirous of anything written by Swinburne, whose talent he practically worshipped.

Burton wrapped his scarf around the lower half of his face and waited.

From this height there was usually a stunning view across London but today the king's agent could barely see his own hand in front of his face. The fog was dense and cold, and the “blacks” were falling—coal dust that coalesced with ice at a higher altitude and drifted down like dark snow.

He frowned. The Beetle should have responded by now.

“Hi!” he called into the flue. “Are you there, lad? It's Burton!”

There was no answer. He dropped three more stones into the darkness and sat patiently. The minutes ticked by and there was still no sound of movement, no whispery voice from the shadows.

Burton called again, waited a little longer, then gave up.

Where was the Beetle?

Half an hour later, after retrieving his vehicle and headwear, Burton continued homeward. For a few minutes he thought a hansom was following him, but when he reached the main thoroughfares, he became so ensnarled in traffic that he lost sight of it.

Central London had ground to a complete halt, the streets jammed solid with a bizarre mishmash of technologies. There were horses pulling carts and carriages; prodigious drays harnessed to huge pantechnicons; steam-horse-drawn hansoms and growlers; velocipedes; and adapted arachnids and insects, such as harvestmen and Folks' Wagon Beetles, silverfish racers and omnipedes. Burton even saw a farmer trying to drive a herd of goats through the streets to Covent Garden Market.