Blackstone and the Burning Secret (The Blackstone Detective Series Book 4) Page 19

  ‘And you do believe that, don’t you?’ Lansdowne asked.

  ‘Believe what?’

  ‘That the poison is nothing but malicious?’

  ‘Of course I believe it,’ the Prime Minister said, with not quite as much conviction as the Secretary of War would have liked. ‘Even allowing for your gambling debts…’

  ‘I have no gambling debts!’ Lansdowne said passionately.

  ‘I apologise,’ the Prime Minister told him. ‘What I should have said was that even if you did have gambling debts—and I, of course, accept your word for it that you don’t—it would be inconceivable that an honourable man such as yourself would ever contemplate stooping to the depths of which you are being accused.’

  ‘It is encouraging to know that I retain my Prime Minister’s confidence,’ Lansdowne said. ‘And am I to dare to hope that when this scandal eventually blows over, I will be offered another place in the Cabinet?’

  But though he spoke the words clearly and forcefully, there was no real conviction behind them.

  Nor was there any in the Prime Minister’s, ‘But of course, Henry,’ which inevitably followed them.

  31

  Blackstone returned to Scotland Yard shortly after two o’clock, and had only just entered the main gate when he was informed by the constable on duty that Sir Roderick Todd had been baying for his blood for the previous hour.

  The constable had not been exaggerating, Blackstone realised when, a few minutes later, he found himself standing before the Assistant Commissioner’s desk. For though he’d seen Todd in some black moods before, he’d never seen anything quite like this.

  ‘You just couldn’t keep your nose out of…’ Sir Roderick began. He stopped for a moment, in order to examine the Inspector more carefully. ‘Are you drunk, Blackstone?’ he continued, outraged.

  Blackstone swayed slightly. ‘No, sir.’

  Not quite, he added, as a mental qualification.

  Not yet.

  But then it was still a long, long time till the pubs closed their doors for the night.

  Todd took a deep breath. ‘You just couldn’t keep your nose out of it, could you, Blackstone?’ he said, resuming his planned tirade.

  ‘I’m afraid that I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir,’ Blackstone said.

  And don’t really care, either, if truth be told.

  ‘The Prime Minister telephoned me!’ Todd said. ‘The Prime Minister himself!’

  ‘I always knew you had friends in high places,’ Blackstone replied, and only just managed to suppress a giggle.

  ‘He asked me questions. About Lord Lansdowne. Direct questions, you understand! Questions on which it was impossible to be evasive!’

  In other words, questions he had to give a straight answer to, Blackstone thought. And that couldn’t have been easy for Todd—because it was never easy to change the habits of a lifetime.

  ‘Don’t you want to know on what he based these questions?’ Sir Roderick asked.

  ‘Not particularly,’ Blackstone admitted.

  ‘Of course you don’t. Because you already know! But I’ll tell you anyway. They were based on information contained in an anonymous letter—a letter that you sent.’

  ‘I didn’t send any letter.’

  ‘Yes, you did. You sent it because you were determined to get Lord Lansdowne, whatever it took. Well, you’ve succeeded. He’s going to resign. But you’ll pay for it yourself, as well—by God, you’ll pay.’

  ‘You can’t pin it on me,’ Blackstone said defiantly. ‘Anyone could have sent the letter.’

  ‘No, they couldn’t,’ Sir Roderick countered. ‘There were only three people who had in their possession the information that the letter contained—me, you and your sergeant. Now I know I didn’t send it, so that just leaves the two of you. Do you think your sergeant is responsible?’

  ‘No,’ Blackstone said firmly. ‘Sergeant Patterson would never even think of doing that.’

  ‘So that leaves just one person it could be, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I didn’t send the letter,’ Blackstone repeated.

  ‘I’ll break you for this,’ Todd promised. ‘It may take a few days—it may even take a few weeks—but your days on the Force are numbered. So start getting used to the idea of being a civilian again, Inspector. Start planning for whatever kind of future you hope to have.’

  Hope? Blackstone thought, as an image of St Saviour’s Workhouse came unbidden to his mind. Hope doesn’t come into it!

  ‘Well, what have you got to say for yourself?’ Todd demanded.

  ‘Is that all, sir?’ Blackstone replied. ‘Can I go?’

  ‘Yes, you can go,’ Todd told him. ‘You can go all the way to hell, as far as I’m concerned.’

  *

  Patterson was sitting in the office, his feet resting comfortably on the desk, when Blackstone entered.

  ‘What did Todd the Sod want?’ he asked.

  Blackstone walked over to his own chair, and sank down into it. ‘Our esteemed Assistant Commissioner wanted to tell me that my career with the Metropolitan Police is all but over.’

  ‘He’s always saying that,’ Patterson said cheerfully, ‘but he hasn’t made it stick yet.’

  No, but this time he will, Blackstone thought. This time there’s no doubt he will.

  ‘Do you have anything to report?’ he asked, half-heartedly. ‘Do you want to hear about the tails you put on Mouldoon and Rilke?’

  ‘Might as well.’

  ‘Mouldoon went back to his lodgings, Rilke went straight to the Austro-Hungary Club.’

  ‘Did they know they were being followed?’

  ‘Our men don’t think so. They say that both suspects seemed so relaxed that they weren’t even looking.’

  And why was that? Blackstone wondered.

  Because they knew they were about to get what they wanted!

  Because though nobody had told him, the Government was about to give in to McClusky’s demands, and hand over the hundred thousand pounds, which he, in turn, would hand straight over to the German!

  Yes, that seemed the most likely explanation. Rilke and Mouldoon would get what they wanted. McClusky, no doubt, would be rewarded for his part in the whole thing. And Lord Lansdowne, though he had been forced to resign, would be able to pay off his gambling debts and survive with his reputation intact.

  So who had come out of the whole sorry business as the losers? There were only two of them, as far as Blackstone could see.

  The first was the Honourable Charles Davenport, who had lost his life as a result of miscalculating the amount of explosives required to set the Golden Tulip on fire.

  And the second? The second had been an honest—but sometimes foolhardy—police inspector, who had nowhere to go from now on but down.

  *

  The American Consul-General was a man who liked to leave no question in his mind unanswered, and ever since the visit by Sergeant Patterson, one particular question had persistently been nagging away at it.

  He knew, with something approaching certainty, that the man in the sketch the policeman had shown him was definitely not called Mouldoon. But try as he might he could not put another name to the face, nor say where he had last seen the man.

  He walked over to his office window, and looked down on the busy street below.

  ‘Think!’ he ordered himself.

  The sketched man was not a distant relative of his, nor a friend of a close friend. He was fairly sure of both those things. On the other hand—as he had informed the policeman—when they had met it had been on terms of near-equality, which ruled out at least eighty percent of the people whom he came across in the normal course of events.

  Since leaps of imagination had gotten him nowhere, he decided to adopt a more systematic, logical approach. He needed to start his mental search somewhere in the past, he told himself, and perhaps going back five years would not be too much of a stretch.

  So what had he been doing on New Year’
s Eve, five years ago?

  He had been at a party in New York, he recalled, and it had been a fairly grand affair. He ran through the people he could remember attending, and searched the corners of his memory in case the man who called himself Mouldoon was lurking there.

  No, that was not it. That was not it at all.

  By the time the Consul-General had worked forward two years, he was starting to get a headache. Yet, convinced as he was that he had finally developed the right approach, he ploughed on relentlessly.

  He began to picture the summer of 1898, and the opening of a new art gallery in Boston. It had been a smart event, he remembered—but not that smart. Unlike many similar galas in the city, the committee in charge had not, on that occasion, consulted the Social Register before issuing invitations. In fact, the heavily embossed cards—which were, in fact, also an invitation to take the initial steps towards some kind of social acceptability—had been sent to anyone who had made a considerable contribution to the cost of the project, and as a result there had been more nouveau riche gathered together than the Consul-General could ever remember seeing in one place before.

  The Consul-General snapped his fingers. That was it! he told himself. That was where he had met the man!

  He rapidly crossed his office, and took down a book from the shelf. It was a weighty tome, and bore the ponderous title of Leading American Industrialists in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.

  The Consul-General had never thought of the book by that name. He was, secretly, something of a radical, and to him it had always been The American Almanac of Robber Barons.

  He laid the book on his desk, and started to flick through the pages. Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Rockefeller…

  There it was—Tyndale! The family had not merited as many pages as some of the other tycoons in the book, but they were still deemed worthy of a sizeable entry, including several group portraits. And it was in one of these portraits that the Consul-General found the face he was searching for.

  *

  The laboratory bench was covered with the photographs of the torsos of the corpses which had passed through Ellie Carr’s hands in the previous few days.

  ‘Your long—and somewhat impatient—wait is over, my good and faithful servant,’ Ellie said to Jed Trent. ‘I am now prepared to reveal to you the results of all my labours.’

  ‘And about time,’ Trent grumbled. ‘What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?’

  ‘The first few photographs are of what’s-’is-name—thingamabob—the man the police fished out of the river,’ Ellie Carr said.

  ‘Davenport,’ Jed Trent said. ‘His name’s Davenport.’

  ‘Names don’t matter to me,’ Ellie Carr said airily. ‘Now over here, we have the—’

  ‘The photographs of the other cadavers, which I obtained by dubious means—and in all probability at considerable cost to myself—in order that you could carry out your dubious experiments,’ Trent interrupted.

  ‘Exactly!’ Ellie agreed brightly. ‘Now what I tried to do was to replicate the events which led to our first cadaver…’

  ‘Thingamabob?’ Jed Trent suggested.

  ‘Davenport!’ Ellie Can said. ‘And stop distracting me. I’ve worked very hard at this.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Trent said.

  ‘I’ve tried to replicate the way in which Davenport lost his life. It wasn’t easy, because so much of it was guesswork, and if you’d only been able to lay your hands on a few more stiffs—’

  ‘We’d probably both have been behind bars, living on a diet of bread and water, by now.’

  ‘…I’d have been able to build in a few more variables,’ Ellie said severely. ‘Anyway, I think I’ve done quite well, given the restrictions under which I was working.’ She slid another set of photographs over to Trent. ‘This is the first corpse we fired at. I told the soldiers not to use too powerful a charge, but you can’t expect men who are used to being shouted at to listen to a reasonable, polite request, and they rather overdid it.’

  ‘Poor bloody pauper,’ Trent said. ‘I’ll wager he never dreamed, even during a lifetime of misery he was forced to endure, that after his death he’d be almost blown to pieces.’

  ‘He assisted, albeit involuntarily, in a scientific experiment,’ Ellie Carr said crisply. ‘He contributed to the advancement of our knowledge, and criminologists in the future will bless him for it, even if not by name. In other words, my dear Jed, he did more that was useful once he was dead than he ever managed to achieve while he was alive.’

  ‘You can make anything you do—however horrible—seem reasonable,’ Jed Trent said, almost admiringly. ‘It’s a great talent.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ellie Carr said, ignoring the irony. ‘Now the charges we used for the other cadavers were not quite so powerful, and I’m fairly sure that the third of the firings was a fair replication of the accident—if, indeed, any accident did actually occur.’

  ‘What do you mean—if any accident did actually occur?’ Jed Trent asked.

  ‘Look closely at the other sets of photographs,’ Ellie Carr said. ‘Look at the way the piece of iron is embedded in the subjects’ chests, and then tell me what you think.’

  Trent picked up the magnifying glass, and examined the pictures taken at the second of Ellie Can’s experiments. He spent some time on them, before moving on to the third and last of the cadavers. Finally, he went right back to the other end of the bench, and re-examined the pictures taken of the Honourable Charles Davenport.

  ‘Well?’ Ellie Carr asked impatiently.

  ‘The second and third ones aren’t exactly the same,’ Trent said.

  ‘Well, of course they’re not. The amount of charge used was different in each case.’

  ‘But I can certainly see the similarities.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And they both look quite different to the photographs of the man who was fished out of the river.

  Ellie Carr beamed. ‘Exactly!’ she said.

  32

  It was a little over two hours after he had entered his lodgings that Mouldoon emerged again. This time he was accompanied by a heavily veiled woman, and since the detectives who were waiting outside in a hansom cab had not seen her enter the apartment, they could only assume that she had been waiting there for him when he arrived.

  Mouldoon and the woman were both carrying luggage—he had a heavy portmanteau, she a large carpetbag. Mouldoon hailed a cab, and the two of them climbed in. As it pulled away from the kerb, the detectives instructed their driver to follow it.

  They didn’t have to follow for long. The cab stopped in front of Victoria Railway Station, and the American and his companion disembarked. They did not go directly into the station, however. Instead they waited outside until they were joined by a third person, whom the detectives instantly identified as Rilke. He, too, was carrying a heavy piece of luggage, which suggested to the watchers that the three of them were intending to take a long journey.

  The trio entered the station, and the detectives—now joined by the team which had been following Rilke—followed at a safe distance. Mouldoon, seemingly unaware that he was being watched, bought the tickets, and then he, Rilke and the woman, strode off in the direction of the platforms.

  Once they were out of sight, one of the detectives went straight to the ticket office. He showed his warrant card to the railway clerk, then said, ‘What did you sell to the man who’s just left?’

  ‘Tickets,’ the clerk replied. ‘Three of them. First class.’

  The detective sighed. ‘Imagine that!’ he said. ‘A ticket office selling tickets! I’d have expected you to sell them a plate of jellied eels.’

  ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic, officer,’ the clerk said. ‘I’m only doing my job, you know.’

  The detective suppressed the urge to say that he, too, was only doing his job—and the ticket clerk was making it a lot harder—and contented himself with asking, ‘Where were the tickets for?’


  ‘Dover.’

  ‘And were they return tickets? Or just one-way?’

  ‘Just one-way. I told him it would be cheaper if he bought returns, but he didn’t seem…’

  The clerk dried up mid-sentence. There didn’t really seem to be much point in saying any more, when the detective was already hurrying away in the direction of the nearest phone box.

  *

  ‘That was Detective Constable Hale,’ Patterson said, hanging the phone back on its cradle. ‘Mouldoon, Rilke and some woman—as yet unidentified—have just caught the train to Dover. They were all carrying quite a lot of luggage with them. Mouldoon had a portmanteau, and the woman was carrying a big carpetbag.’

  ‘They’re leaving the country!’ Blackstone groaned.

  ‘That would seem likely,’ Patterson agreed. ‘I can’t see any conceivable reason they would want to go to Dover at all, unless it was to catch a boat to the Continent.’

  They wouldn’t leave without the money, Blackstone thought angrily. No one would walk away from a hundred thousand pounds. So his worst suspicions were confirmed, and the Government had given way to blackmail after all!

  ‘Have either Mouldoon or Rilke seen anybody who might possibly be McClusky since they were released from custody?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Not according to our lads with the watching brief. They claim that Mouldoon went straight to his apartment, and Rilke went straight to the club.’

  But that proved nothing, Blackstone thought. McClusky could already have been inside the club, waiting for Rilke’s arrival. Or possibly it was the woman in the veil who had been the collector. Maybe the money was in the big carpetbag the watchers had seen her carrying.

  Blackstone rose from his seat and strode—only slightly unsteadily—over to the door. He was going to see Sir Roderick Todd again. He knew it was a mistake—that it could only make his already disastrous position even worse—but he was going to do it anyway.

  *

  ‘Bursting in on me like this is making things so much easier for me, Blackstone,’ Sir Roderick said. ‘This exhibition of insolence alone would be enough reason to get you thrown off the Force.’