Murder At The Music Hall: (Auguste Didier Mystery 8) (4 page)

‘Corpse in Nightingale Lane, Ma,’ he said now.

‘What’s a nice Chief Inspector from Scotland Yard doing in the likes of Nightingale Lane?’

‘Ship called the
Lisboa
sailed on Saturday. A silver cross with garnets belonging to Prince Henry the Navigator. Either of them mean anything to you?’

‘Not a tin farthing.’

Ma could not read, and however heated, the discussion of the newspapers, society or intelligentsia passed her by. Ask her whether Jimmy Longtooth had been up to his old tricks, or another Charlie Peace or Kate Webster appeared in her territory, and she was as informed on her subject as Mycroft Holmes himself.

‘The cross was stolen from Windsor Castle Saturday morning, and I was tipped off it was leaving on the
Lisboa.
The
Lisboa
left two hours early and before I got there. There was a corpse in Nightingale Alley.’

‘As dirty as a dock casual’s long johns.’

‘They don’t wear ’em, do they?’

‘Not often.’

He took her point and considered it. Then he shook his head. ‘Just because the King’s involved, that don’t mean I’m smelling rats where there’s only pure roses, Ma. There was a small garnet lying by the corpse.’

She looked at him sharply. ‘Think this cross was pinched from him, do you?’

‘Yes. Why kill him if he’d already delivered the cross?’

‘Stop him from talking?’

‘Then why employ him in the first place? He came from Limehouse, so someone took care over this. I don’t like it, Ma. Could you ask around – urgently?’

‘With the afternoon collection. Now, give me that laundry of yours. It’ll be at your desk seven prompt.’

The battered suitcase having been duly ticketed took its place amidst its even humbler fellows.

Rose stared out from his high, small office overlooking the river below. By rights he should have surrendered this office to Twitch on his promotion and moved into the more accessible room on the first floor. He’d refused to. Accessibility was not one of his objectives. If people needed him, they’d come; if they couldn’t be bothered to climb a few stairs, they could stay away and solve their own problems. A simple method but it worked, and he still had his view of the Thames. It helped him. The Thames flowed into London, it flowed out again to the sea. It didn’t care whether it was passing the House
of Lords or Limehouse Basin; it carried its corpses and secrets on regardless.

The only snag about retaining his old room was that Twitch had magnanimously decided to make the same gesture and did not accept the room elsewhere to which his promotion to Inspector entitled him. He was still next door, the faithful terrier that waited for bones. Rose had found his loyalty, somewhat to his surprise, strangely moving. He firmly buried such emotion and replaced it for daily use with his usual sharp irritation.

There was one good thing about Inspector Stitch (Twitch was Rose’s not so private name for him); he delivered the goods. Unlike Grey, who let them sail down the river out of sight.

‘You wanted me, sir?’ Stitch was still under the impression he owed grateful thanks to Rose for not blocking his promotion. Correctly, in fact. Better the devil you knew was Rose’s guiding principle.

‘Yes. That post mortem on the docks’ corpse arrived yet?’

‘Yes, sir. I’ve just read it.’

‘Bring it in, there’s a good chap.’

Pink in the cheeks at this unaccustomed courtesy, Twitch vanished and reappeared with the alacrity of the devil in a pantomime. Rose read through the brief report. ‘Late thirties, died between three and four as Grey said.’ Very helpful. That meant he might or might not have delivered his package. ‘Remains of undigested meal . . .’

‘What interests you, sir?’

‘Probably nothing, if His Majesty wasn’t mixed up with it – in a manner of speaking.’

‘If this chap came from Limehouse to London Docks to deliver a package, why should the body turn up in Nightingale Lane?’ Stitch asked portentously.

‘Perhaps he had a notion to choose his own execution place,’ Rose said scathingly.

‘Perhaps that’s where he handed the package over, sir. If it was a secret mission, he wouldn’t want to go up to the ship.’

‘A rendezvous, eh? Sometimes, Stitch, you excel yourself.’

‘I know, sir,’ Stitch murmured, flustered. ‘And then,’ driven to new heights of endeavour, ‘the captain or contact on the ship murdered him as per instructions.’

Rose looked at him. ‘No reason why not, I suppose,’ he grunted. ‘Or he was murdered on the way to the ship and the cross was stolen? In the fight a garnet dropped out.’

‘Why go by Nightingale Lane? That’s the far side of the docks from Limehouse.’

‘Perhaps he came by railway, Stitch,’ Rose suggested mildly.

Twitch looked crestfallen, and relenting Rose added: ‘If the cross was stolen before it reached the
Lisboa
it’s still in this country.’

‘Why, sir?’

Rose stared at him. ‘Because—’ He stopped. ‘I’m going off it, Stitch. We need to go back to our muttons. If it’s straight theft, why plan to steal a cross that isn’t worth much in its materials and gems? It’s
what
it is that makes it special.’

‘Your laundry from Stepney, sir.’ An impassive
sergeant, puffing reproachfully, entered to hand over the battered suitcase.

Rose’s eyes gleamed. ‘Did you pay him?’

‘Yes, sir. Six shillings.’

Rose calmly counted out this fortune, while Stitch watched, dumbfounded. He made a mental note to tell the Chief about Postlethwaites of Clapham who’d do it for tuppence.

Still the Chief had his idiosyncrasies and if a Chinese laundry was one of them, it was harmless enough. Catch his Martha asking any Chinese men to do his laundry. She’d wash it all again. He tried to imagine Martha married to Egbert Rose and shuddered on her behalf. Thank goodness she had him, Alfred Stitch.

Once the glory that was Twitch had departed, Rose opened the suitcase. Inside was the same pair of socks he had sent, now washed, and with one other benefit. Tucked inside one of them was a piece of paper, which he eagerly extracted. It was an advance programme for a music hall, the Old King Cole. He ran his eye down it: Nettie Turner and her Donkey Song, Will Lamb plays Macbeth, Our Pickles sings . . . All at the Old King Cole.

He grinned. He remembered it, for it was one of the halls on his old beat. He picked up the telephone, and shouted amiably at the operator. A few moments later Inspector Grey’s querulous voice was all attention. ‘Ah, Grey,’ Rose told him agreeably, ‘I expect you remember that ship which unfortunately left early. I need to make a few more inquiries. No objection, have you?’

Grey had not, especially if they did not rebound on his head.

The Old King Cole was not quite the Empire. Auguste looked round aghast at his new, thankfully temporary, domain. And its ‘restaurant’ moreover was far from Escoffier’s Carlton. He tried to remind himself he should be grateful for the opportunity to be able to cook at all, but his first sight suggested some prices were too high to pay. He had chosen to walk from the Tower of London to the theatre in order to acquaint himself with the area, and counted himself lucky to arrive. True, no snarling bandits had leapt out on him, but despite the most valiant efforts of the local council to improve the image of the road, the high dockland warehouses on his right, and the rows of uninviting-looking shops, and pubs, with the ill-smelling alleyways and lanes leading off, suggested the efforts had merely resulted in the tide of murky humanity being swept back off the main thoroughfare and forcibly held there, while it bided its time to leap out on the unsuspecting. Like Auguste Didier. Groups of sailors and dockers huddled outside the pubs, watching him curiously, and he was glad to reach the music hall.

The Old King Cole, not far from St George’s-in-the-East church, had once been a humble pub, a wayside inn outside Shadwell, and no better, no worse than its fellows. Then an ambitious publican in the mid-nineteenth century had coincided with the decision to improve the murky image of the Ratcliffe Highway by renaming it. What better improvement than to expand his old ale-house of dubious reputation into a music hall? Consequently he built out to the rear an ornate and, he vowed, high-class music hall with a circle, gallery,
fauteuils
and sedate atmosphere. Unfortunately, he
forgot to mention this desire for social betterment to his clientele, which remained identical to that which had provided his ale-house with its reputation. When LCC regulations first discouraged, then banished, the serving of food and drink in the auditorium, he gave up the struggle for respectability. The new owner, Percy Jowitt, also had ambitions, and turned the long bar on the ground floor into a grill-room, which degenerated quickly into a common eating house. Nevertheless little by little, by raising the prices, his clientele did improve to the point where respectable loving husbands were able to bring wives, even daughters. Jowitt glowed with satisfaction – though not for long. Wives and daughters, he discovered, rarely drank as much as their menfolk, and his ownership of the Old King Cole had degenerated into a constant struggle to retain such brilliant newcomers as he discovered, and to persuade his regulars to support his ageing regular turns which he shared with half a dozen or so similar institutions within a radius of three miles. Jowitt was now in his sixties, a dapper, dark-haired, anxious man, ever torn between stark reality and a Micawber-like hopefulness of the infinite possibilities of the future.

Auguste stood at the doorway and surveyed the smoky, smelly hell which he had fondly imagined a paradise. He summoned his strength. If Alexis Soyer could cook on the top of Pyramids, or in the Crimea, surely he, Auguste Didier, could transform this den into something approaching a place fit for food. The smell of stale food and plates wafted towards him, increasing the nearer he approached to the bar.

‘Most of the cooking is done downstairs on the
gridirons and ovens,’ Jowitt told him reassuringly. ‘You keep it hot up here, and the potato cans are outside.’

This largely passed over Auguste’s head, as he peered into a foul-smelling hot dish.

‘Faggots and mustard pickle,’ Jowitt told him proudly.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘That’s the Monday Special. You heat it up for the evening crowd. Penny hot, three-farthings cold. And in the evenings you have the whole splendid range. Herrings, saveloys, pease pudding, currant pudding, lobscouse—’

Auguste pricked up his ears, and his spirits cautiously halted awhile in their downward progress. Lobscouse? He had never heard of the dish, but no doubt it had to do with lobster. Some local dialect word, perhaps. He could produce lobscouse thermidor, lobscouse salad—

‘And eels,’ Jowitt was saying.

‘A
matelote a la Parisienne?’

‘A what?’

‘In a delicious casserole with white wine, oysters, crayfish butter and a little nutmeg?’

Percy evidently decided this was a joke, and after the required roar of laughter, amplified kindly: ‘Collared or jellied.’

Auguste gazed at him nonplussed.

Jowitt did not notice. ‘Mostly they take the ha’porth and ha’porth though.’

Auguste searched his vast store of culinary knowledge, but could not recollect such a dish. ‘Is this a local name for fish?’ he asked doubtfully.

Percy blinked. ‘Fish and potatoes. Ha’porth of fish,
ha’porth of spuds.’ He began to wonder if this cook knew his onions.

‘
À la lyonnaise?’
Auguste stopped, in quiet desperation. There was no common ground. He was on his own. ‘I cannot cook and serve all by myself,’ he said firmly. ‘And serve the drink as well.’

‘Of course not, my dear fellow,’ Percy reassured him hastily, glad there was something he could answer. ‘Wouldn’t expect it. Full staff at your beck and call. There’s the girl.’

‘What girl?’

‘
The
girl.’

‘Her name?’

‘Can’t bring it to mind. I expect she has one,’ Percy told him somewhat apologetically, smoothing down suspiciously black hair. ‘And old Jacob does the drink. You don’t have to lift a finger there.’

‘You must remember I am here for another reason too,’ Auguste said firmly, unconvinced.

‘Keeping the bailiffs away. I know. Very good of you.’

‘
Quoi?’
This was no time for politeness.

‘When Nettie offered me your services, I was truly grateful, my dear man. They mean to get me this time.’

‘But—’ Auguste broke off. What was the point? He fulminated against women, not so much for their deviousness, but for their blithe disregard of minor details . . . like informing those most concerned of what was going on.

‘Might I ask if you are expecting many bailiffs at the moment?’

‘You never
expect
bailiffs,’ Percy explained reasonably. ‘If they came when they were expected, you’d make
yourself and your goods scarce, wouldn’t you?’

Auguste had never been in the unfortunate position of discovering the truth of this statement, though in his apprentice days he had come close to it. He could see the logic of Jowitt’s argument. Nevertheless it seemed he was expected to cook for numberless hordes, help quench their never-ending need for beer, keep the bailiffs from troubling Mr Jowitt, and, as a mere extra, prevent a possible foul murder by being a constant shadow to Will Lamb. Fortunately it was only for a week.