SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman (17 page)

"Not what I should have written at all," he remarked, clouding the brass with his breath. "First into the Redan you may have been, Verity, but you ain't got a hand for a letter."

"You 'ave, though?" said Verity with some scepticism. Stringfellow hoisted himself up.

"I don't know but what I mightn't 'ave. Getting into a whorehouse in Langham Place ain't no worse than breaching the walls of Bhurtpore with a line of Cherry-pickers."

"What about the letter?" Verity insisted.

"Well," said Stringfellow, "I never was at a dame school, and on my soul I ain't no sort of cove with a pen in my hand. But I can compose after a fashion when the fit is on."

He lifted the latch on the wooden doorway of the lean-to and bawled into the interior room of the litde mews dwelling.

"
Miss Belial Bring a ink-and-dip!
Sharp
!
"
Bella, brushing back stray blonde curls with one hand, and hol
ding a littl
e wooden writing-tray in the other, flitted into the low-ceilinged scullery. Verity, who was burnishing the pimpled leadier of new boots with a hot iron, in preparation for plain clothes duty at the Victoria Cross parade, looked up at the girl. At his gaze, the colour flooded into Bella's plump young cheeks.

"Sit down," said Stringfellow brusquely, "and take 'un all down as I say."

Verity listened. With the leather ironed smooth, he had burnished the toe-caps of the boots to a pair of black mirrors before Stringfellow finished.

"There
!
"
said Stringfellow finally. "Now tell me if you ever heard a le
tter that was the like of that !
A daughter's innocence ruined!
The mother demented with grief !
The ultimate suicide of both! And all that along o' a 'ouse of abomination in Langham Place, run by a villain called Roper! Now, 'ear the sorrowing father and 'usband plead for the safety of 'is one ewe la
mb, lured to that place of sin!
See 'im beg the protection of the common law, on bended knee! Behold 'im, spurned by the haughty Croaker of the Whitehall constabulary! Oh, the pity of it, my friends, the pity
..."

"Your daughter ain't made away with herself," said Verity with some heat, "nor she ain't never been in a 'ouse of sin. And I was given to understand that the late Mrs Stringfellow went off with the cholera."

"Draw it mild, old fellow," said Stringfellow reproachfully. "You ain't ever going to see the inside of Roper's whore shop unless we pitch it strong."

"Pitch it strong as you like," Verity remarked, "you won't shift Mr Croaker. He's hard as a file. Why, he wouldn't turn a hair if you and all the cabmen of the city, and all their wives and daughters, hanged yourselves in a row outside his window."

"But this letter ain't going to Mr Croaker," said Stringfellow with a flourish of his stick. "Take your eyes off the lodger, Miss Bella, and write at the bottom, 'To the Right Honourable and Right Reverend Secretary, The Society for the Suppression of Vice, Essex Street'." He turned to Verity again. "Your Mr Inspector may be 'ard as a file, sir, but I once had the honour t
o drive this right reverend gentl
eman from Hyde Park Gate to Exeter Hall. Mean as a ferret and sour as vinegar! Shouldn't wonder if he was to make your Mr Croaker feel quite poorly for a day or two."

Anonymous in regulation tunic and tall hat, Verity marched among the other members of the search detail, following Inspector Swift towards the plain black wagon. Two parallel benches accommodated the twelve constables.

"A reverend gentl
eman it was," said Sergeant Samson furtively, "came calling on Mr Croaker. You wouldn't believe how Mr Croaker took on afterwards."

"That's all gammon!" said Meiklejohn, a youngish, fair-haired sergeant with a Scots brogue. "One of the light-fingered gentry turned evidence as to the whereabouts of Joe the Magsman and a hundredweight of silver plate. That's the lay."

The horses sprang forward at the crack of a whip and the whole conveyance bounced and rattled across the cobbles. Verity sat in silence as the wagon rumbled the length of Nash's elegant quadrant, and then drew into a mews somewhere just beyond Regent Circus. Much as he wanted to see the inside of Ned Roper's establishment, he hoped that Joe the Magsman, rather than Stringfellow's letter, had been the reason for the search. By arrangement with Inspector Swift, the uniformed men were to lead the assault, the plain clothes detail following up as soon as any prisoners had been taken or any suspects cleared out of the way. Swift's strategy on these occasions was to keep the plain clothes detail, even though wearing uniform, out of sight of those whom they might subsequendy have to hunt. Verity, knowing that a

uniform alone would hardly conceal him from Roper, was duly grateful.

As Swift, two sergeants and four constables, marched up the steps in a phalanx, the remaining officers were drawn up in a line on the pavement below with all the precision of infantry awaiting the order to advance. Swift set up
a
thunderous knocking at the door which must have alerted all the occupants. Verity and Samson drew back
a
little to see if there was any attempt at an escape over the roof. After
a
long minute, the door was opened and the six uniformed men disappeared through it at a run, as if Bill Sikes and all his confederates might even then be swarming out through the skylights. There was an obscure scuffle, somewhere within the lighted vestibule, a scream of agony which was clearly heard in the street, and two heavy blows followed by almost complete silence.

A crowd of spectators from among the passers-by was beginning to gather at the steps when Inspector Swift reappeared and beckoned Samson and Verity.

"Quick as you can, my boys," he said in a jovial whisper, "the woman Jacoby and two bullies are under detention in the little parlour. Make your way through the rest of the house smartly as you can."

As the two men moved through the entrance hall, Verity began to imprint on his memory the plan of the house. One side of the ground floor was taken up by the front parlour and the well of the stairs behind it. On the other side, a long "music room" ran from the tall front windows with their deep velvet curtains and pelmets, to the smaller bow-window, overlooking the mews yard at the rear of the house. A fine Broadwood grand piano, French polished to a deep chestnut gloss, and a dozen little chairs with tapestry seats and fluted legs made up the furnishings. The sheen of the parquet floor confirmed that this was the "introducing room," where officers and gentlemen drank and danced with the girls until they found partners to match their tastes.

Above the black and white tiling of the entrance hall, the wrought-iron balustrade of a graceful staircase ascended in a series of diminishing ovals to the coloured glass of the skylight, far above. Sunlight
falling through the lofty stair
well threw diffused patterns of rose and turquoise on the pale oak panelling. Verity and Samson climbed to the first floor, half of which was occupied by the most expensive of the bedrooms with its pink-shaded lamps, nude statuary, and large gilt-framed mirrors. The room was unoccupied, as was the first of the two smaller bedrooms on the floor. At the door of the second room a uniformed constable, his tall hat still firmly on his head, stood at ease. He brought his feet together at the two sergeants' approach, without quite standing at attention.

"Three persons detained, Sergeant," he said proudly, "on Mr Inspector Swift's orders. One male person and two female. The male person claims to have been accosted by the women and brought here. Seems the small rooms is let by the hour during the afternoons for any street woman with the money. An accommodation house, you might say. They all refuses to give their names, except that one girl calls herself Adeline and the othe
r Elaine. I'd say they was a
liases."

"Aliases," said Sergeant Samson knowledgeably, pushing open the door.

The room was the smallest and shabbiest so far, no doubt let to street girls for that reason. A washstand, two small chairs, and a large iron-framed bed stood as if in a whitewashed cell. A silk top-hat, a gold hunter, coins and keys, lay on the washstand. On the chairs were a pile of skirts, a frock-coat, and a pair of trousers. The man lying back in the bed was in his fifties, more than a little drunk, and grinning stupidly through his grey mutton-chop whiskers. Though his shoulders were covered by his shirt, Verity had no doubt that he was naked otherwise under the sheet. Completely revealed on top of the sheet, a naked girl lay either side of him. The elder, who had called herself by the newly fashionable name of Adeline, was a fleshy adolescent of sixteen or seventeen. Her companion, Elaine, was no more than fourteen or fifteen. She seemed a younger version of the elder girl, with the same narrow, insolent eyes, the same snub nose and lank brown hair hanging loosely down her back. At Verity's entrance, neither girl made any effort to conceal herself beyond rolling over on her stomach with a squeal of amusement and grinning back at him over her shoulder.
The man too, knowing the powerle
ssness of the law on private premises, joined in the laughter, placing a well-manicured hand on each of his young mistresses. Verity looked at the two girls with distaste, taking in their blackened feet and mud-spattered calves, the sores at elbows and knees, and the constellations of tiny red spots across their buttocks. For all his experience, it still dismayed him that a man of evident wealth should endure the embraces of two girls whose worst diseases were probably infinitely more horrible than any visible blemishes. He closed the door to a shout of derisive amusement and climbed the stairs again with an involuntary shudder.

The second floor revealed two small bedrooms and the upstairs drawing-room, with its padded door and its deadness of sound-proofed space. It seemed more like a nursery than a drawing-room, since a painted rocking-horse stood in the centre of the carpet casting a long shadow in the dying sun. There were two Coburg chairs and a heavy sofa in blue velvet, a riding switch of bamboo cased in leather thrown at random on its cushions.

Higher still were two attic rooms, but the final curve of the stairs was blocked by a wrought-iron wicket-gate, extending the full width of the stairway and from the ceiling to the level of the steps.

"Try it," said Samson at Verity's shoulder, "it don't seem to have a lock."

Verity pushed, then pulled, and the gate swung open towards them. But the attic rooms were completely bare and had evidently not been used. The windows were barred, suggesting that they had once served as bedrooms for very young children, which, Verity, supposed, might also explain the wicket-gate on the stairs. With Samson's assistance, he raised a floorboard from its joists and explored underneath with the aid of a lantern. There was nothing to be found.

"Stands to reason," said Samson huffily, as the two men went back down the stairs. "Where would you hide a leaf?" "In a tree," said Verity glumly. "Where would you hide a dead body?" "In a churchyard."

"And where would you hide a pile of money?" "In a bank."

"There
you are," said Samson triumphantl
y. "They stripped this place clean as the breast of a Christmas goose. You only got to look at the rooms! There ain't nothing now but a paper note of 'ow much money is on deposit to Coutts! Much chance there may be of finding that."

"What about the man with the two young women?" suggested Verity hopefully.

"Well, now," said Samson, "you might break his nose, or his jaw, for satisfaction. But you ain't never going to get a brief swore out against him. A-cos it wouldn't stick."

They went down to the basement of the house, as a matter of routine interest. It consisted of a kitchen and a scullery, whose only occupant was a girl, with the deformed head of imbecility, crying into an apron. Adjoining the scullery, a coal chute ran upwards to the mews yard at the back of the music room.

"You don't need secret ways nor skylights," Verity remarked, "not when you could be up there or through the back window, and get three or four streets away before the first constable was through the door at the front."

Back in the entrance hall, they could hear the voices of Ellen Jacoby and one of the bullies swearing total ignorance of the very existence of Jerome Sant,
alias
Joe the Magsman. From the other bully there was no sound beyond a whimpering that seemed to subside to an intermittent groaning. Verity took a furtive peep and saw Tyler sitting in a chair. His face was the colour of yellow clay, one eye almost closed by an ochre-coloured swelling, and his teeth awash with blood. When one of the constables thoughtlessly touched his right arm, Tyler emitted a sharp, involuntary yelp. Meiklejohn, the Scots sergeant, made his way out to join
Verity and Samson. His large, freckled face was radiant with satisfaction.