Blackstone and the Burning Secret (The Blackstone Detective Series Book 4) Page 11

  ‘Sand’s certainly part of it,’ Ellie Carr said. ‘But there are other things as well.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, ribs for a start.’

  ‘Cow’s ribs?’

  ‘Human ribs,’ Ellie said, and wondered what the people in the Anatomy Department at UCH would say when they realised one of their skeletons had gone missing.

  ‘If it had been tightly packed sand, it might just have survived the impact,’ the sergeant said dubiously. ‘If it’s anything else, a shell will blow it to pieces at this range.’

  ‘I don’t want you to use a shell,’ Ellie said, reaching into the carpetbag she’d brought with her. ‘I want you to use this.

  She produced the piece of metal she had dug out of the chest of the corpse in the morgue, and held it out for inspection.

  ‘Tricky,’ the sergeant said, as his questioning-obstructionist side all but fell away, and his professional interest took over.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Ellie asked. ‘Can’t you fire it?’

  ‘Oh, we can fire it, all right,’ the sergeant said. ‘It’s getting it where you want it to go that’s the problem. It’s not shaped like most projectiles, you see. I’m not sure we can make it fly true.’

  ‘Maybe if we centred it, and then gave it some padding,’ the private suggested.

  ‘That might work,’ the sergeant conceded. ‘But even so, when it hits the dummy at high velocity, it’ll be like hitting an egg with a hammer—bits of it will fly everywhere. Is that what you want?’

  Ellie shook her head, reached into her carpetbag again, and produced a photograph of the dead man in the morgue. ‘That’s how I’d like it to look,’ she said. ‘I want the piece of iron embedded in its chest.’

  The two soldiers glanced at each other questioningly.

  ‘I suppose if we used a light charge, we might just be able to do that,’ the private said.

  ‘We’ll give it a try, anyway,’ said the sergeant, who was now becoming quite enthusiastic about the challenge.

  ‘I appreciate your help,’ Ellie told him.

  *

  The uniformed inspector—who had been the first man with any real authority to arrive on the scene—had quickly deployed his men at both ends of Tower Bridge. Now he stood watching, at a safe distance, as an Army officer with a cut-glass accent and a lieutenant’s pips on his shoulder examined the infernal device.

  ‘Rather him than me. Much rather him than me,’ the inspector murmured—and found himself wondering why a man like the lieutenant, who obviously had all the right connections, should actually choose to go in for this line of work.

  The lieutenant stood up, and waved what the inspector took to be the ‘all-clear’ signal. The inspector, not without some misgivings, began to walk towards the tower.

  The lieutenant smiled as the inspector approached. It was the fresh-faced smile of a fresh-faced young man who looked as if he really didn’t have a care in the world.

  ‘Quite an intricate piece of work,’ the lieutenant said, as if he were talking about some common household object, rather than a bomb which could have blown him to Kingdom Come.

  ‘It’s safe now, is it?’ the inspector asked nervously.

  ‘Oh, quite safe,’ the lieutenant assured him. ‘In point of fact, it was never in any real danger of going off.’

  ‘So it was a dud?’

  ‘I didn’t quite say that.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand what you did say,’ the inspector admitted.

  The lieutenant reached into his jacket pocket, and produced a packet of expensive-looking cigarettes. He extracted one, flicked it into the air, caught it in his mouth, lit up, and inhaled with obvious pleasure.

  ‘When would you say the bomb was actually set up?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s almost impossible to say,’ the inspector admitted. ‘That milkman didn’t notice it the first time he crossed over the bridge, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t here then. It was still foggy at that time, and he could easily have missed it.’

  ‘If I were a betting man—which, of course, I am—I’d be willing to wager it was placed here at around two o’clock,’ the lieutenant said.

  ‘That’s very precise,’ the inspector said.

  ‘Precision is my watchword,’ the lieutenant replied. ‘It’s the clock which tipped me off. It was supposed to be the timer for the bomb. It’s an alarm clock, you see.’

  ‘It’d certainly alarm me,’ the inspector said.

  The lieutenant did not seem to notice the joke. ‘When the alarm goes off, the hammer, instead of hitting the bell, makes contact with this wire here, and the bomb is detonated,’ he said.

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘The bombers got confused about the time—probably because they were working in thick fog.’

  ‘How do you mean? Confused?’

  ‘The bomb was set to go off at two o’clock, when, presumably, the bombers themselves would be well clear. But they must have actually set it after two o’clock. In other words, instead of it going off when they wanted it to, it was actually timed to go off at two o’clock this afternoon.’

  ‘So you were never in any danger?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘You must have been relieved when you realised that.’

  The lieutenant shrugged. ‘Not really. Made the whole job rather boring, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I’m sure it did,’ the inspector said, thinking, as he spoke, that the lieutenant didn’t look like a lunatic.

  ‘By the way, I found this among all the gubbins,’ the lieutenant said, holding out a brown envelope. ‘It seems to be addressed to one of your people.’

  The inspector took the envelope from him, and saw that ‘Inspektor Blackstone, Scotland Yard’ was written on it.

  *

  The first shot the two artillerymen fired missed the dummy by a good twenty yards. The second—after adjustments to the padding had been made—missed by ten.

  The third—after further adjustments—was more or less on target. The dummy, still tied to the chair, was lifted into the air and deposited several feet from its original position.

  ‘Well?’ Jed Trent demanded when Ellie Carr had walked over and examined the results.

  ‘Encouraging,’ Ellie said.

  ‘And what, exactly, does that mean?’

  ‘It means that it’s a close enough result to what I suspected to indicate that I might be on the right lines…’

  ‘Well, thank Gawd for that!’

  ‘…but not so close that it absolutely confirms my theory.’

  ‘So you’re saying we’re going to have to do it again?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Ellie Carr said. ‘But we can’t use dummies anymore.’

  ‘Then what will we use?’

  ‘Bodies.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Bodies, Jed!’ Ellie said sweetly. ‘Corpses! Cadavers! Stiffs! Surely you’ve been working in the morgue long enough to know what I’m talking about by now.’

  19

  There used to be only two groups of people who wished to have their portrait painted, Marcus Leighton thought, as he busied himself with charcoal and paper that early morning in Blackstone’s office.

  The first group had been like Oliver Cromwell—the man who had once been the virtual dictator of Great Britain, and who had instructed the artist who painted him to depict him as he really was—‘Warts and all’.

  Then there had been the second—much larger—group. They wished to be painted as they thought they were—or as they would like to be—and they did not appreciate the warts in the least. These people were worse than criminals in Leighton’s eyes. They were cultural philistines. They were to art what Genghis Khan had been to market gardening. They had made it almost impossible for any artist with integrity—and he considered he had integrity enough to sink a ship—to scrape even the meanest of livings.

  The scarcity of the first group and preponderance of t
he second had almost driven him to despair. Then his talents had been called on by the Metropolitan Police—the wonderful, wonderful Metropolitan Police—which wished his art to reflect life as closely as possible. The Met had enough murderers and robbers on its hands to keep him in work for ever, and whilst he would have preferred his work to hang in a gallery, he took some pride in knowing that instead it hung on every police notice board in London—and was studied with an intensity that most gallery patrons could rarely muster.

  Leighton finished the sketch, and handed it across the desk to Blackstone. ‘Is that all right?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Blackstone replied. ‘You’ve caught the very essence of the man.’

  Leighton smiled—perhaps he even smirked. ‘And is that the last one?’ he said.

  ‘That’s the last one,’ Blackstone agreed.

  Leighton yawned. ‘Then I’ll get back to the bed from which you unkindly ripped me in the middle of the night.’

  ‘You do that,’ Blackstone said. ‘And you won’t forget to send us your bill, will you?’

  ‘Would Leonardo da Vinci have forgotten to put in a bill for the Mona Lisa?’ Leighton asked rhetorically. ‘Would Michelangelo have neglected to collect his rightful recompense for his work on the statue of David?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Blackstone admitted.

  Leighton grinned. ‘Then neither will I,’ he said.

  When the police artist had gone, Blackstone spread the results of his labours out on the desk in front of him.

  There were five sketches in all. Three had been drawn from Molly’s descriptions: one of the man she called ‘Lord Moneybags’ and the others of his companions, whom Blackstone had started to think of as the Dead Man and the Workhouse Man. The remaining two, of Mouldoon and Rilke, had been drawn from Blackstone’s own descriptions.

  ‘Molly’s got a good eye,’ the Inspector said approvingly. ‘Her impressions of the Workhouse Man pretty well match up with the other descriptions we have of him. As for the Dead Man, we’ve only seen him on a slab, but I can well imagine he did look like this before he got a rowlock through his chest. So if she’s right about the two of them, there’s a more than even chance that her description of Lord Moneybags is spot on, too.’

  ‘And that’s important, because this “Lord Moneybags” bloke is our man,’ Patterson said firmly.

  ‘You sound very confident about that,’ Blackstone said.

  ‘I am. He’s the one.’

  ‘And what brings you to that conclusion?’

  ‘The application of my logical thought processes to the problem,’ Patterson said, perhaps a little pompously.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘And, of course, my instinctive grasp of detective work.’

  Blackstone remembered Patterson as he had been four years earlier—newly promoted and very unsure of himself—and found it almost impossible to suppress a smile.

  ‘So would you like to tell me where your “natural instincts” and “logical processes” have led you?’ the Inspector asked.

  ‘Certainly, I will,’ Patterson agreed. ‘We know for a fact that this Lord Moneybags’s two closest associates were both involved in the arson attacks, don’t we, sir?’

  ‘Yes, we do.’

  ‘So it’d be nothing short of a bloody miracle if Moneybags wasn’t involved as well.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Blackstone said cautiously. ‘And what, in your opinion, caused him to become involved in the attacks?’

  ‘Gambling debts!’ Patterson told him. ‘A man who loses money as heavily as Lord Moneybags does is bound to end up heavily in debt sooner or later, however rich he was to start with. And in his case, I think it’s more a question of “sooner”. Four thousand pounds is a hell of a lot of money for any man to lose in a single night’s gambling.’

  ‘True,’ Blackstone agreed.

  ‘I think he’s hugely in debt to the Austro-Hungary Club, which is almost the same as saying he’s hugely in debt to Rilke and Mouldoon. And how’s he ever going to pay it back? By blackmailing the British Government out of one hundred thousand pounds!’

  ‘Yes, that would certainly be a solution to his dilemma,’ Blackstone said. ‘Given the size of his debt, it’s possibly the only solution which he feels is open to him.’

  ‘So now we pull in Rilke and Mouldoon for questioning, do we?’ Patterson asked enthusiastically.

  Blackstone shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not? Once we have them down in the cells, we’ll soon sweat Lord Moneybags’s real name out of them.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong about that,’ Blackstone told him. ‘There are men who crack like an egg once the questioning’s started, and men you need a sledgehammer to break open. From what I’ve already seen of them, those two are going to need a sledgehammer—and even then, it’ll take time.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Patterson said cheerfully. ‘I like a good long interrogation. Who needs a week in Southend-on-Sea, when you could be spending your time locked up in a small, sweaty room with two gutter-snipes instead?’

  Blackstone grinned. ‘I applaud your enthusiasm,’ he said. ‘But we can’t hold them for a week. Without charging them, we can only hold them for seventy-two hours.’

  ‘Then, by all means, let’s charge them.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘With running an illegal gambling club.’

  ‘And we can prove that, can we?’ Blackstone asked. ‘Well, not actually prove it, in so many words,’ Patterson admitted.

  ‘Not actually prove it at all,’ Blackstone countered. ‘If we pull them in, it will only alert them to the fact that we’re on to Lord Moneybags, and the moment we release them—and we will have to release them—they’ll tell him just that.’

  ‘So we just let them go on about their nasty business as if they were as pure as the driven snow?’ Patterson asked, disapprovingly.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Blackstone pointed out. ‘We will pull them in eventually. But before we do, I want to find out more about them. What I really need is some kind of leverage I can use to make them open up.’

  ‘And where are you planning to get this leverage from?’

  ‘From my doggedly determined Sergeant, of course. I’d like you to collect as much information as you can on the pair of them.’

  ‘From where, exactly?’

  ‘You could try the American and German Consulates first. And once you’ve done that, you could send telegrams to the police in both of those countries, to see if either Rilke or Mouldoon has a criminal record.’

  ‘Well, I am going to be busy, aren’t I?’ Patterson said. ‘Is there anything else you’d like me to do, sir? Clean your spare pair of boots for you? Discover a cure for the common cold?’

  ‘I don’t think you’ll have time to do either of those things,’ Blackstone said, mildly. ‘But there is one further task you might turn your hand to, if you’ve got a little extra time.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘I’d also like you to try and establish the identity of our corpse. If we know who he is, it might give us a lead on Lord Moneybags.’

  ‘Simple stuff. Consider it done,’ Patterson said sarcastically. ‘And while I’m running round like a blue-arsed fly, what exactly will you be doing with your time, sir?’

  ‘I shall be going back to St Saviour’s Workhouse.’

  ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  I don’t want to do it, Blackstone thought. I hate the idea of doing it. But it has to done.

  ‘I think I rather hurried the investigation the first time I was there,’ he admitted aloud.

  And who wouldn’t hurry it? Who wouldn’t get away from that dreadful place as quickly as he could?

  ‘What do you mean—you hurried it?’ Patterson asked.

  ‘Workhouse Man had to have had a reason for getting himself admitted to St Saviour’s. We know that for a fact because, from what we’ve seen of the way they operate so far, t
his gang doesn’t do anything without a reason.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘So what I’ll be trying to find out is why Workhouse Man was willing to devote two days to going through the indignity and discomfort of pretending to be a pauper.’

  There was an urgent knock on the door, and a uniformed constable entered the room.

  ‘Yes?’ Blackstone said.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir, but there’s been another attack. They used dynamite this time. On Tower Bridge. But fortunately, the bomb didn’t go off.’

  ‘And why should you think this attack had anything to do with our arsonist?’ Blackstone asked, sounding slightly irritated. ‘It could just have easily been the Fenians, striking what they see as a blow for Irish independence.’

  ‘The Fenians wouldn’t have left a note addressed to you personally, sir,’ the constable said, placing the letter on Blackstone’s desk.

  Blackstone opened the envelope.

  ‘SEE HOW VERSATILE WE ARE, MR BLACKSTONE?’ the note taunted. ‘WHY DON’T YOU TELL YOUR BOSSES TO STOP BEING SUCH BLOODY FOOLS AND GET THEM TO PAY UP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE?’

  ‘When did all this happen?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘The bomb was discovered a couple of hours ago, sir.’

  ‘And why wasn’t I informed immediately?’

  ‘Like you, everybody thought it was the work of the Fenians at first. Then the bomb was defused and the soldier in charge found the note.’

  ‘Who was there when the note came to light?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Let me see. There was Inspector Walker, Sergeant Watts, half a dozen constables and—’

  Blackstone sighed. ‘Thank you, you can go,’ he told the constable.

  He read the note once more, then slipped it across the desk to his assistant.

  ‘Doesn’t tell us anything we couldn’t already have worked out for ourselves,’ the Inspector said gloomily when the Sergeant had finished reading it. ‘We know our arsonists are determined, and we know they’re resourceful. And we know there’s as much chance of the Government giving in to their threats as there is of the Queen dancing the cancan in Piccadilly Circus.’

  Patterson grinned. ‘Now that’s a sight I’d pay money not to see,’ he said. ‘So what do we do now?’ he continued, growing more serious. ‘Should we go down to Tower Bridge and examine the scene of the crime?’