The Dead Assassin: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (18 page)

“Tom, do you see that hearse the coffin is being loaded into?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything about it seem remarkable?”

“Remarkable?” Blenkinsop squinted a moment. “Nothing that strikes me. I seen a thousand like it in me day.”

“Precisely. Superstitious lot that we are, most people see a hearse and look away. One might remember a brewer’s dray cart, or a wagon delivering furniture. But to the casual observer one black hearse is very much the same as another: anonymous. As are the funeral grooms with their black frock coats and top hats draped with crepe—a uniform consciously designed to submerge an individual’s personality beneath the role they fulfill. Except there is something unique about the driver of that hearse.”

Blenkinsop looked again. The driver was just settling himself on the seat of hearse. Although he was dressed identically to the other funeral grooms, he stood out because of the port-wine stain running across one cheek and down his neck.

“I seen that bloke before!” Blenkinsop cried. “But where?”

“Lord Howell’s residence, the night of the assassination. I believe it was also the very same hearse.”

The young detective glanced at the Scottish author, brows hunched. “Coincidence?”

Conan Doyle’s moustaches drooped into a frown. “My friend Oscar Wilde believes in coincidences. Do you?”

The young detective shook his head. “Bein’ in my line of work … no. Never have. Never will.”

Commissioner Burke appeared with his spaniel-faced assistant Dobbs at his side, satchel slung over one shoulder. The commissioner shared words with the driver and then, to their surprise, Dobbs clambered up onto the hearse and took a seat beside the driver.

“What the devil is going on?” Conan Doyle breathed.

The hearse drew away from the curb and turned about in the road before heading away in the opposite direction.

Conan Doyle banged on the cab ceiling. The overhead hatch opened and the cabbie’s eyes appeared in the opening, “Yes, guv’nor?”

“Follow that hearse. And don’t let it slip away!”

The cabbie cracked his whip and the hansom lurched away in pursuit.

“Where we off to now?” Blenkinsop asked.

“Wherever Dobbs and that hearse go. And I’m dashed interested to find out where.”

*   *   *

Over the next few miles, the houses they passed grew poorer, shabbier, steadily declining from raunchy to ramshackle until they rock-bottomed at derelict. Suddenly, the cab clattered to a halt while the hearse they were pursuing continued on.

“What? Why have we stopped?” Conan Doyle shouted up.

A hatch in the roof flung open and the cabby’s white-stubbled face appeared. “We’re almost into St. Giles. I ain’t going in there no matter how much dosh yer offerin’. I can’t spend nuffink if I’m dead.”

“What do we do now?” Blenkinsop asked.

Conan Doyle pondered. He looked up the long street and noticed that the hearse had also drawn up and that Dobbs was preparing to climb down. The Scottish writer pulled a half-sovereign from his pocket. “Here,” he said, pressing it in Blenkinsop’s hand. “Take the cab and go home. I shall proceed on foot … alone.”

Blenkinsop was incredulous. “Alone? Into St. Giles? Are you bonkers? You won’t last five minutes! Especially dressed in them fine clothes.”

The young policeman had a point. Conan Doyle made a quick decision. He shrugged off his fine wool topcoat and hat and set them in Blenkinsop’s lap. “Deliver my coat and hat to the Athenaeum Club. I shouldn’t be too long.”

“I can’t let you go in there on your own. Not into one of the worse rookeries in London.”

“I’m sorry, Tom, but I believe I’ll be safer alone than in your company.” He smiled archly. “I may look a bit like a toff, but they’d sniff you out as a copper in a heartbeat. Besides, you work for me now, and that’s an order.”

Without waiting for an answer, Conan Doyle leapt down from the cab and hurried off in pursuit.

As the hansom clattered away, he spotted the adjutant a scant fifty feet ahead. Oblivious to the fact that he was being followed, the small man stood at the curb conferring with the funeral grooms atop the hearse and finally took his leave of them, striding off toward the huddle of squalid houses and frowsy shop fronts that marked the last traces of civilization before descending into the lawless hellhole of St. Giles, one of the most dangerous slums in London.

As Conan Doyle trailed from a discreet distance, Dobbs stopped and went into each of the shops in turn: a green grocer, a butcher, and a shop selling secondhand clothes. Each time, he exited after less than a minute. Puzzled, the author of Sherlock Holmes decided he needed to find out why. He wandered into the secondhand clothes shop where a large lout slouched in a chair rocked back against a motley pile of clothes, paring his nails with a rusty knife. The man glared suspiciously from under a pair of eyebrows the size of hedgehogs as Conan Doyle strode in and made a laughably poor attempt at pretending to be browsing the worn, holed, and ragged castoffs hanging from lengths of twine stretched across the shop.

“See anything to your fancy, sir?” the man asked spikily. “Only I doubt we got nothing your size in here.”

Conan Doyle dropped the pretense and spoke directly. “The gentleman who was just in here a moment ago. He is, ah, a friend of mine.”

“That right?”

“Yes. You see, I am a doctor and … I had wished to consult with him … on a matter of some … delicacy.”

“Oh yeah? What’s yer name, then?”

“Ah, Doctor … Watson. Doctor John Watson.”

“And what’s your business coming in my shop, sniffing about, Doctor Whatsits?”

The voice of a woman, well versed in woe, came from somewhere deep behind the piles of clothing. “Bobby,” the woman urged. “We don’t want no trouble—”

“Shut yer pie ’ole woman!” the lout bellowed.

“I concur with the lady,” Conan Doyle echoed. “I also am not looking for trouble.”

“Too bad, ’cause you found it.” The lout surged up from this chair, which clattered to the floor. He flourished the knife and advanced menacingly on Conan Doyle, who chose the better part of valor and hurriedly retreated from the shop into the street, feeling rather humiliated. Up the road he saw the diminutive figure of Dobbs, striding toward a row of tenements whose walls were propped up by giant wooden beams to stop them from collapse. Conan Doyle hurried on, desperate to keep him in sight. But as he passed the grocer’s store he noticed a woman just setting a printed flyer in the shop window:

13/13

The Revolution is Upon Us.

Join the struggle for workers’ rights

Meeting: St. Winifred’s

Friday, Dusk

So that was what Dobbs had stopped to deliver. Conan Doyle had seen an almost identical flyer the night he and Wilde were called to the murder scene of Lord Howell: the one Dobbs had produced as evidence of Vicente’s anarchist sympathies. Only this one featured a date and a call to attend a meeting.

Conan Doyle pressed on, hurrying to catch up with Dobbs, who by now was a tiny figure in the distance. The little man had been busy: 13/13 flyers were tacked onto every boarded-up window. The Scotsman passed an abandoned church, the roof holed and ruined. Nowadays the only churchgoers were gangs of idle boys who gathered on the street corner to fling stones at the few remaining panes of a stained glass. The name carved into the stone lintel above the missing church door read S
T.
W
INIFRED’S
. More of the 13/13 flyers had been wedged into crevices in the stone, and many lay scattered on the ground where the wind restlessly tossed them.

By this time, Dobbs had reached the tenements and strode into the midst of a large group of rough-looking men gathered on the street. As Conan Doyle watched, the police commissioner’s adjutant moved through the crowd, reaching into his satchel to pass out large handfuls of leaflets.

“What on earth are you up to?” Conan Doyle muttered to himself, watching from across the street. Suddenly, he tumbled to it as the men receiving the leaflets then began to distribute them amongst comrades just arriving upon the scene. Soon a huge mob milled on the street, and it was clear by the rumble of voices they were whipped up and spoiling for a fight. The mob turned and moved as one, marching down the street to a straggle of tenements where suddenly the crude weapons they had been concealing up a jacket sleeve and down a pants leg—iron pipes, cudgels, knives, broken bottles—began to appear, clutched in their hands.

Across an open swath of waste ground a hundred or more navvies were swinging picks, wheeling wheelbarrows, flinging shovelfuls of dirt as they laid the rails of a new stretch of railway. It soon became obvious what was going on: the tumbledown tenements lay in the path of the railway, and now a work gang—protected by a squad of hired brutes and a small force of constables conspicuously armed with truncheons and pistols—had come to tear it down. Conan Doyle realized he was watching two armies drawn up and about to collide. As the opposing gangs faced off, men cursed and spat at one another, but both sides seemed reluctant to strike the first blow. In the midst of railroad laborers stood a man in a fine frock coat and a gray top hat. He clutched a set of rolled-up drawings and shouted orders around a cigar clamped in his jaws. It was a figure Conan Doyle instantly recognized: Tristram Oldfield, railroad magnate.

And, more importantly, a member of the Fog Committee.

Despite the oaths, curses, and threats shouted back and forth, the work gang advanced slowly and steadily toward the first tenement. The building was in an advanced state of dereliction. The roof sagged like a broken-backed horse. The entire structure leaned at an alarming angle, a row of giant timbers propping up the low wall. The work gang edged forward, constables threatening with their truncheons, forcing the defenders to back away until they reached the shadow of the tenement and the navvies fell to work. Using long iron bars, they levered free first one of the giant props and then another. As they loosened the third, an ominous crack sounded, followed by the rumble of shattering masonry as the entire side of the building cleaved and sheared away. Men scattered and ran for their lives as masonry and bricks avalanched down, raising a cloud of soot and dust that engulfed both sides in a blinding cloud of grit. A chill breeze swept the cloud away, revealing that the entire side of the tenement had sloughed off. It was like tearing open a giant termite nest. To his horror, Conan Doyle saw women and children scurrying about the exposed rooms, screaming with terror. And more pathetically, many old and infirm people still lying in their beds, unable to flee.

Chaos erupted. The mob surged forward and clashed with the constables. Skulls collided with truncheons and blood flowed. Rocks and bottles and cobblestones pried up from the roadway whizzed low and lethal through the air. A single gunshot ripped the air and a man fell to the ground clutching his stomach. The fighting paused for a moment, but then a voice screamed “MURDER!” and the m
ê
l
é
e resumed with increased ferocity. Conan Doyle threw himself to the ground and sheltered behind a lamppost as the fusillade crashed down about him. The wind tumbled a square of paper through the air and plastered it against the iron pole he crouched behind. He peeled it loose. It was a simple square of deathly black paper printed with a contrasting design in stark white ink:

CHAPTER   15

CHECK AND MATE

“Does that look familiar?” Conan Doyle asked, tossing the 13/13 flyer down on the table.

The Scots author had run Oscar Wilde to ground in his habitual morning haunt: the domino room of the Caf
é
Royal, a favorite spot for London’s artists, longhairs and bohemians, a place where the buzz of gossip competed with the clink of coffee cups and the clack of domino tiles being slapped down onto marble tabletops. Wilde looked up from the chair he reposed in. As always, he was smoking, one hand cupping the elbow of the arm holding the cigarette, his chair pushed back from the small table to allow room to cross one leg over the other.

The Scotsman dropped into an empty chair and spoke in a voice both urgent and excited. “I have many new discoveries to share. I just procured that flyer from St. Giles. If you read it, you will see that there is to be a meeting of anarchists. I believe it to be a kind of war council for revolution.”

Wilde studied his friend with a doubting expression and then shook his head dismissively. “Revolution? Surely, not in England. Yes, it is possible to whip up discontent and fiery fervor in the English but only until the moment the pubs open. It is difficult to plan, organize, and maintain a revolution around licensing hours.”

“Perhaps, but you will never guess who was distributing these leaflets.”

“You have a lot of questions for this early in the morning, Arthur. I seldom achieve full awakening consciousness until after my third coffee.”

“Dobbs. You know the man. The police commissioner’s lackey.”

Wilde’s eyes widened. “Dobbs? No wonder he was mister-johnny-on-the-spot when it came to locating the subversive literature he claimed to have discovered in the valet’s room. But why would the police be distributing anarchist literature?”