The Thieves' Labyrinth (Albert Newsome 3)
Read The Thieves' Labyrinth (Albert Newsome 3) Online
Authors: James McCreet
It is really wonderful and most interesting to pursue the successive steps of this monster, and to notice the absolute certainty with which the silent
hieroglyphics of the case betray to us the whole process and movements of the bloody drama . . .
Postscript to
On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
, Thomas de Quincey, 1853
ONE
Toll-collector Weeton stopped breathing and listened. His finger paused upon a sentence in the book before him. Had he heard the faintest clink of metal on stone?
He looked out through the window of the toll-house, but there was little to see. The broad span of Waterloo-bridge vanished into a swirling nimbus of yellow fog that quite swallowed it after
just three lamps: a causeway into nothingness, sepulchral in its silence at that pre-dawn hour.
He exhaled. The sound must have been a chain echoing up from one of the yawning arches beneath. His finger resumed its dry whisper across the page, and he hoped against another suicide on his
duty. Fog usually dissuaded the hopeless and unfortunate, for while it was fearful enough to leap into the dark waters, it was surely worse still to plunge blindly into embracing vapour.
The wall clock ticked its hollow wooden seconds as he read. The gaslamps hissed softly. The pages of the book turned.
Then the scream.
Short and sudden, it might have been a gull but for the single outraged note of horror that made it undoubtedly human: a scream of violent death.
Weeton folded the corner of the page with shaking hand and, taking his hat from its hook, stepped from the warmth of the toll-house out onto the bridge.
Cold, moist air settled immediately upon his skin as he inhaled the smoky night. He looked towards the Surrey side, but faced only that impenetrable density of riverine breath. All was silent
again.
‘Hello there!’ he cried. ‘Is anyone out there? I am the toll-collector.’
His voice seemed a feeble thing – fragile and insignificant.
‘I say! Does anybody need help?’
Fog shifted lazily, suffocating the gaslamps with its sickly hue. Opacity swelled, revealing less, then more.
Then . . . was that a figure? A human form?
He strained to see. There had been legs, a head, perhaps an angular upraised elbow. Then nothing. And the figure had been moving oddly, jerkily – not exactly running, but animated in that
manner reminiscent of a dog struck mortally by a cart and attempting an escape on shattered legs.
Coldness had now soaked through the toll-collector’s coat. The silence of the empty bridge was replaced by the thudding of blood in his ears.
‘I . . . I say! Is there anybody . . . ?’
A figure emerged from the body of the fog: stumbling, staggering, half falling. A man. His face was directed to the heavens, appearing to cry soundlessly with a gaping mouth. Both hands were
about his throat.
Weeton stood immobile.
The figure, however, seemed insensible to the toll-collector before him and continued his hectic momentum until, finally, he sagged to his knees and toppled right there at the tollhouse door,
rolling onto his back with a depleted groan.
Blood jumped from the fleshy wound at his neck. His hands were red with it. His shirt was blotched with it.
‘My G—! My G—!’ muttered Weeton, kneeling in compacted dung beside the fallen man. ‘What happened, sir? Did you see your attacker? Is he still on the bridge? I must
ring the bell!’
He rushed inside the toll-house and came out with the hand bell, which he set clanging with a phrenzy born of terror. Would it carry through the bilious miasma of the fog? Would it bring the
other toll-collector and constables? Or would it bring the killer himself – out there on the span – leading him to where his unfinished victim lay?
The wounded man twitched and gave a bubbling inarticulate gasp.
‘Sir? Do not despair – help will be with us shortly. What is your name? Can you speak? Can you tell me who did this to you?’
The man’s eyes, staring madly, turned upon his inquisitor with an unfathomable yearning. A weak rasp came forth: more a gargle from the severed throat than a word.
Weeton leaned closer: ‘I . . . I cannot hear you, sir . . . O, where are the constables! Where is our help?’
Again, the victim made his appeal and the toll-collector moved his head lower to hear. The scent of fresh blood dizzied him and he felt hot breath on his ear: sounds that seemed to diminish down
and down a tunnel into blackness.
‘Sir? Sir! Do not die . . . help will be here shortly . . .’
But the man was dead – chest unmoving, eyes open, the gash in his neck steaming still in the cold night air.
Weeton felt that he was kneeling in blood. He stood on shaky legs to support himself against the toll-house and again urged the bell’s clamour, now for his own salvation.
Footsteps echoed strangely from the Surrey side. He raised the bell as a weapon above his head, ready to strike if necessary.
But it was the form of toll-collector Wilkins who was released from the groping folds of the fog and who ran to where his colleague stood.
‘Weeton – what is going on?’ he panted. ‘Is it another suicide? O! What a horrible sight . . . !’
‘Did you pass anyone as you came over, Wilkins?’
‘I did not see a soul, but I could barely see my own feet. Perhaps in the pedestrian recesses . . .’
‘When did this man cross through your barrier?’
‘There has been only one in the last hour. It must be he. Yes – it looks like the one, only he wore a top hat before.’
‘Are you sure nobody came after this man? I believe there may be a murderer out on the bridge.’
‘I am quite sure, Weeton. Nobody came after him, and only one about forty minutes before that.’
‘A coster sort, pushing a barrow?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘He passed through my barrier some time past, and I have admitted nobody since.’
‘So there is nobody else on the bridge.’
‘Perhaps. Where are the cursed constables tonight? We might be victims ourselves.’
‘“Murderer”, you said? How can it be so if there is no one out there? Do you not recall the man who shot himself some months past? This fellow must have cut his own
throat.’
‘I heard a scream – a scream of terror. The suicides do not scream that way. They go silently into the river, as you well know.’
‘I heard no scream, Weeton.’
‘Well, I heard it clearly enough and I will never forget it.’
‘If there truly has been a murder, we should inform the Bridge Company. And you should not allow any constables onto the scene. Do you not recall Mr Blackthorne’s recent instructions
on that matter? He was quite specific.’
‘Yes, you are right. Will you go and wake Mr Blackthorne while I see to any constables that arrive?’
‘I should not leave my barrier unmanned . . . And if there
is
a murderer about, as you say, I may run into his arms . . .’
‘You have already left your barrier . . . and you will be in even deeper water if Mr Blackthorne first hears of this through the newspapers.’
‘D— you, Weeton! I will go – but I will tell him you sent me.’
‘Just go!’
Wilkins pursed his lips at the dead body on the ground between them, shook his head, and bustled through the Middlesex barrier into a city that was still little more than a dirtily illuminated
cloudscape.
It is, of course, the nature of the London fog to descend and liquesce at its own whim. Merely two hours later, Waterloo-bridge presented an entirely different scene. The body
of the victim had been removed from its position by the toll-house, and dawn was a flicker in the eastern sky. The full span was again visible across the Thames.
And what a melancholy scene it was in its glistening grey emptiness. The broad avenue was quite immense when seen devoid of pedestrians and traffic, for all passage had now been barred and the
thoroughfare closed by the Bridge Company. At each end, a growing chaos of goods wagons, costermongers and river workers let forth a murmur of imprecations at the situation. Meanwhile, Blackfriars
and Westminster bridges began to fill with an excess of humanity.
In point of fact, Waterloo-bridge was not completely unpopulated. People at both ends were able to see a diminutive solitary figure at its centre behaving in a most eccentric manner. First he
knelt, examining the roadway. Then he walked to the parapet, peering down into the turbid waters. Then he went into some of the recesses beside the pedestrian walkway, vanishing for a few moments
as he searched within. In between these studies, he seemed to pause to write in a small book.
Even from a distance of some hundreds of yards, the figure presented a singular appearance. He wore a rather shapeless russet cap that sat in strange juxtaposition to a good suit of rough tweed.
Although he moved with the relative agility of one not much beyond forty years, he nevertheless wore an oddly anachronistic salt-and-pepper beard shaped into a point. On his hands were some
particularly fine black kidskin gloves that he had not removed, despite his foraging around the dirty masonry.
His name was Eldritch Batchem.
After he had completed his perambulations about the centre of the bridge, he walked back towards the Middlesex toll-house, pausing occasionally along the way to bend and examine some small
detail invisible to the massing crowds. Whenever he did so, there was a palpable lull, as if that soiled mote between his leathern fingers were the vital clue that would solve the crime and open
the thoroughfare.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned Mr Blackthorne, resplendent in a dark wool surtout and beaver-skin top hat, waited at the Middlesex barrier with his jaw set in consternation. As Bridge Controller
for the Waterloo Bridge Company, he considered it
his
bridge, no matter what the burghers of the City might have to say on the matter. He might close it if he liked, and any crime committed
thereupon was his to investigate, preferably with all expedience so that no taint of infamy or satirical allusion – ‘A penny toll
and
your throat cut!’ – could
further infect it.
Finally, the investigator arrived at the barrier, where he cast an enigmatic glance over the crowds observing him. He might almost have been searching the dozens of faces for one he knew, but he
was interrupted in his scrutiny by the approach of his employer.
‘Mr Batchem – I am pleased to meet you,’ said Mr Blackthorne, extending a hand. ‘I am sorry I could not be here for your arrival earlier, and the toll-keeper told me that
I should not approach you during your work.’