The Thieves' Labyrinth (Albert Newsome 3) (18 page)

It need hardly be mentioned, of course, that
the London Monitor
has never been blessed with the impartiality of our finer press. If a man pays rather more for an advertisement than
strictly required, he might not be entirely surprised to have his own articles accepted with only the lightest editorial touch.

I would like to state that I have never written for such a base publication . . . though that would be a lie. A writer produces words as a manufactory produces bricks – he cannot be
responsible for what is done with the buildings once the blocks are made. Indeed (to further labour the device), it would be my words that would eventually dismantle the walls around me, reducing
my debt, brick by brick, until I could walk through the language-built aperture to freedom.

To that very end, I had been spending my days at the small card table in my cell, producing articles on investigation and other matters related to the
Aurora
case, and then quizzing the
printers’ boys for further news when they came with the proofs for correction. These canny scamps can seldom read for themselves, but they spend most of their lives in the compositors’
room or by the editor’s side and know too well that, for a crust or a coin, they can be bribed for the very latest intelligence even before the presses begin to whir.

Thus it was that my continued incarceration inconvenienced me hardly at all in the accumulation of the news on the streets, though my loss of bread to the printers’ boys was threatening to
render me dead through emaciation before I could write myself liberated. That minor hardship, along with the incessant cold that palsied my slender fingers and drove needles into my wrists, was
tolerable for the time being.

In truth, I was busier than I had ever been. The fashion for all things investigatory, combined with Josiah Timbs’s challenge at the Queen’s Theatre, had generated numerous
opportunities with the common press. And as one who had some prior knowledge of the Detective Force myself, I was a natural enough choice to provide a voice on Messrs Newsome, Williamson and
Mayne.

Nor had I been dormant on the matter of Eldritch Batchem, who, it seemed, was highly selective in his availability to the gentlemen of Fleet-street. Following his acceptance of the challenge by
Mr Timbs, he had not spoken to anyone but the merchant himself. Was he a genius of self-mythology, or had he something to hide? My journalistic nose rather suggested the latter.

I had been unable to extract more information from the turnkey who had worked at Whitecross-street (a dull fellow with a duller memory), but he assured me there was a fellow of his on another
corridor of Horsemonger-street who had also worked at Whitecross at the same time and who might have more to say about the inmate called ‘Crawford’ or ‘Cowley’ or
‘Crowell’. And since there was not the least likelihood of my trusting an interview to anyone but myself, I had no choice but to engineer a temporary transfer to that corridor –
the one with the solitary cells – in order to effect that conversation.

It was, fortunately, a matter of the greatest ease. The law may inform us that only dissenters and those of the Popish persuasion may be excused from Sunday service in gaol, but the warden and
chaplain were of a different view: all debtors were to attend chapel or face three days in a solitary cell on half rations. Accustomed as I was to perfunctorily mumbling Old Testament platitudes
for the sake of my gruel, it was but a matter of letting forth an inventive (and generally rather artful) blasphemous tirade the next Sunday in order to find myself immediately escorted to the
solitary cell.

On taking up my new residence – quite by chance in the lunatic cell with coir matting and canvas on its walls – I was soon able to locate the turnkey in question, who proved to be
somewhat more cogent than his colleague. He did indeed recall the fellow who may have been an earlier incarnation of Eldritch Batchem, and, better still, the dubious debtor had been a resident on
his very wing. Yes, I was told, the inmate had been highly methodical; yes, he had also been rather secretive and irritable if disturbed in his rituals. But there was more . . .

It seems that this Crawford (‘I feel sure it was Crawford . . . or Crowley’) was possessed by disturbing dreams that would cause him to speak or even shout in his sleep. It had been
the nightly bane of neighbouring debtors, who quite disliked the man anyway for his haughty demeanour, and was altogether disturbing to the guards, who eventually took the unorthodox step of
removing him to a private room.

As to the nature of these nocturnal exclamations, they were largely incoherent, as oneiric monologues are wont to be. Nevertheless, there was a tone and inference that was clear enough to the
guards who pressed ears to the cold iron door so they might perhaps afford a glimpse into the tortured soul of the curious fellow under their charge. For all of his diurnal order and control, the
sleeping man was a vortex of despair.

Assuredly, I pushed the turnkey for more detail regarding the words, the names and the terms used in those midnight cries, but he recalled only the broadest tenor: discomfort, unease and great
sorrow. I persisted. Was there not
something
that remained in his memory of those nights – some teasel-like expression or otherwise distinctive nomenclature he had not heard before or
since? Was there not one salient phrase he could repeat to me that would capture the spirit of this Crawford’s pillow-smothered, sheet-twisting agonies of sleep?

‘Liveridge.’

That was all. Was it a name? Was it a place? Was it an imperfectly heard and misremembered conglomerate word: a mere accretion of inchoate phonemes? Was it ‘Live Ridge’ or
‘Liver Edge’? Regrettably, it was all my turnkey could offer in terms of detail on those somnolocutionary outbursts.

I had worked with such meagre tools before, and would again. Somehow, later, it would all coalesce. And if I could sustain myself long enough in that wretched penitentiary to pay off my debt, I
would be the man to deliver the story into print for a sum fully deserving of its exclusivity.

As for the whereabouts of my subject Eldritch Batchem, he was undiminished in his search, and could that day be found in the place where the
Aurora
should have arrived
if such ill fate had not befallen it: St Katharine Dock.

With its towering, all-encircling warehouses and retractable bridges, its clanging cast-iron paving, its many hundreds of vessels and many thousands of workers, its clatter of commerce and the
relentless rumble of the treadmill cranes, St Katharine’s might almost be a city unto itself. Seek the sky here and one instead sees multiplicitous spars, yards, cross-trees, masts, wrapped
sails, limp pennants, loose rigging and the endless jib-festooned brickwork behind which is stored the produce of the globe. One smells molten tar, musty oakum, salt-soaked timber and the feral
reek of sailors – all carried upon the river’s earthy perfume.

Along these characterful wharfs did Eldritch Batchem stroll, conspicuous in his appearance even among the carnivalesque maritime spectacle of tattooed torsos, turbans, sashes, and skins of every
hue. Here, the oddities of the world commingled, and yet the investigator was no less strange in their company.

Perhaps it was his assumption that the brig had in fact docked here regardless of what the documentation maintained. It would have been a simple enough matter to land under a different name
– commodiously effected via those fraudulent landing warrants – and to unload without the merchant being any the wiser. Had Mr Timbs or his agents made their way to the warehouse to
collect his cargo, they would simply have been told that no such stock and no such ship existed. Meanwhile, the vessel itself would by then have long sailed away to be used again, or scuttled
mid-Channel on some moonless night.

Or perhaps the russet-capped fellow was pursuing a different line altogether. Ships here load and unload continuously to the song of rope on pulley, and as they do so their bottoms are filled or
emptied of the ballast that keeps them stable upon the oceans. Since no ship receives ballast without the knowledge of
somebody
, Mr Batchem may have decided upon this as his next avenue of
enquiry.

He had most likely already enquired at Trinity House (that monopoly of ballast upon the river) and learned that no outgoing ship named
Aurora
had requested gravel. That much was to be
expected, though the thorough investigator always reassures himself of the obvious before delineating it so. The next logical step was to speak to the truckmen and ballast-heavers themselves
– those grimy, gritty labourers in their collar-covering hats who toil with the shovel at a thousand portholes across the Port of London.

And here was such a pair at St Katharine’s, going about their work with a determined silence marred only by the rhythmical
slench
of the shovel’s edge into gravel and the
occasional spatter of ballast against the wooden hull. Eldritch Batchem watched with admiration how the burly heavers cast their loads up from the barge with unerring accuracy, and with hardly an
upward glance, through a narrow aperture into the lower holds of the ship, where another would be raking it level in near-total darkness.

Finally, a muffled voice came from inside the vessel and the heavers stopped their labour to wipe grit from their sweating brows and reach for bottles of beer beneath a canvas sheet. By and by,
one of the pair saw that they were being observed from the quay and nudged the other, whose face was skyward with the last of the bottle draining into his throat.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Eldritch Batchem, meeting their gaze, ‘I admire your skill. Every man must have a skill, must he not? I myself am a detective.’

The two ballast-heavers looked up at the curiously dressed man and then at each other. If they had understood his words, they made no sign of wanting to reply.

‘I mean to say that your work with the shovel is most accurate. Do you work only here in the dock, or also among the wharfs of the river?’

Again, the two gentlemen looked blankly back at their interrogator.

‘I wonder if you gentlemen understand plain English? Or perhaps you have a foreman I may speak to rather than my disturbing your rest period any further . . . ?’

One of the men gestured towards the hull with a bottle-clasping hand.

‘Your master is inside there? May I cross into the vessel and seek him out?’

The answering shrug may have been an affirmative, or an expression of the purest indifference.

Eldritch Batchem bustled away from the ballast-heavers and towards the deck of the ship, whose hollow-sounding boards had evidently just been swabbed clean. There seemed to be not another soul
on board.

‘Hello! I say – is anyone below decks?’ he called.

No answer.

He descended a rough wooden stairway into the murk and was assailed with the reek of dank wood, caulking and the cellar mustiness denoting the now empty ship’s most recent cargo of wine
barrels. There was still no one to be seen, so he ventured still deeper, stepping carefully around the coils of rope and neat piles of bolstering timber that must have held everything in place on
some storm-lashed crossing.

‘Ho! Hello! I am looking for the ballast man. Your two heavers advised me I may descend . . .’

Darker and deeper he went, until he might have been descending into the depths of the sea itself, where sunlight penetrates only dimly and where shadows may be abysses or leviathans. Down there
in the vessel’s bowels, below the water level itself, one might indeed have been within the belly of a great fossilized beast, its ropy viscera and broad mossy ribs glistening with a
perpetual mouldy sheen. The smell of the river now seemed stronger: the aroma of the gravel. By and by, a flickering light emerged from the depths: the lamp of the ballast-raker.

‘Hello there! I am Eldritch Batchem – you may have heard of . . . O! You surprised me!’

A rough-hewn and filthy face, made ghoulishly dysmorphic in the shadows of the lamp, had appeared in the frame of a still lower hatchway. It did not seem well disposed to any visiter, but this
did not stop Eldritch Batchem venturing down the final steps into the gravel.

‘What in the name of C—— are you doing below decks?’ said the ballast-raker. ‘Are you a ——— fool? There is no civilians permitted on board. Be
gone!’

‘Sir – if I may ask a simple question regarding any recent loading of ballast for a four-masted—’

‘Are you ——— deaf? I said be gone! This no place for a tourist. Go – or I will make you!’

‘There is no need for rudeness, sir. A crime has been committed and I am invest—’

The ballast-raker took two rapid crunching steps and grasped the front of Eldritch Batchem’s tweed jacket with a tremendous grip, drawing his face to within inches of his imminent
victim’s.

‘I said
be gone
!’

‘This is intolerable! I am an investigator . . .’ said Mr Batchem, struggling for balance on the gravel while trying to prise the iron fist from his clothing. It looked rather like
he was going to suffer an injury if he did not immediately heed the advice given.

Then something changed – something in the eyes of Eldritch Batchem.

What had previously been fear became something fearful. A dread calm came over him and he ceased his grappling with the other fellow for a moment . . . a moment that caused the assailant to
himself pause, relax his grip, and seek the face of his ‘victim’, now set in an unsettling expression of dead-eyed rage.

With a strength giving lie to his proportions, Eldritch Batchem pushed with all his might and sent the ballast-raker careering into the ribs of the hull, where his head collided solidly with the
timbers. He fell to his knees there, stunned, and put a hand to his profusely bleeding scull. In this other hand, he held one of his attacker’s gloves, pulled off during the violent
encounter.

‘Perhaps that will teach you the cost of insolence!’ said Eldritch Batchem, restoring his clothing and demeanour to normality.

But the injured man, his head ringing and the blood trickling through his fingers, could not take his eyes from the bare ungloved hand brushing at the tweed jacket. At first, it was confusion
that made him stare. Then, the more he looked, the queasier he began to feel.