Blackstone and the Rendezvous With Death (The Blackstone Detective Series Book 1 Read online

  ‘So what d’yer make of it, sir?’ asked Sergeant Roberts.

  ‘Well, it’s either murder or the most determined case of suicide I’ve ever seen,’ Blackstone told him.

  Roberts raised an eyebrow. ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  Blackstone sighed. ‘If you want to get on in the police force, Sergeant, then the first thing you have to learn is to laugh at your superiors’ jokes—however bad they happen to be.’

  The sergeant grinned. ‘Right, sir, I’ll remember that.’

  The Inspector lifted one of the dead man’s limp hands, and examined it critically. ‘Any thoughts on this, Sergeant?’

  Roberts peered down at the hand. ‘Broken finger nails,’ he said after a few seconds’ scrutiny. ‘But ’e doesn’t look to me like the kind of bloke ’oo’d ’ave broken ’em at work.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘An’ there seems to be a strand of somefink caught under one of ‘em.’

  ‘Rope fibre,’ Blackstone said firmly. ‘And where was a young gent like him likely to have come into contact with rope?’

  ‘Dunno, sir,’ the sergeant confessed.

  ‘By the river. The broken nails indicate haste, the rope points to a boat. I would suggest he was trying to free a boat from its moorings when he was murdered.’

  ‘You might be right, sir,’ Roberts admitted.

  ‘How long do you think he’s been in the water?’

  The sergeant turned his gaze to the face again. ‘Not much sign of ’im swellin’ up yet. I’d say it couldn’t be more than a few hours.’

  Blackstone nodded his agreement. ‘In other words, he was murdered sometime in the early hours, right by the riverside. Have you got a tide timetable on you?’

  ‘Don’t need one, sir,’ the sergeant said confidently. ‘Down at Wappin’, we know the tides better’n we know our own names. It started to ebb at twelve minutes past three precisely.’

  ‘So assuming we’re right about when the body entered the water, it would have been carried up river for a short time. Then, if it hadn’t been caught up in the mooring ropes, it would have been swept out to sea.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it, sir.’

  Blackstone let the corpse’s hand drop back to his side, and was just on the point of standing up when he noticed the dead man’s left eye.

  ‘What do you make of that, Roberts?’ he said, pointing. ‘It’s bruised.’

  ‘You’re right. But I don’t think that happened when he was getting his throat cut. Do you?’

  Roberts shook his head. ‘From the way it’s healed, I’d say he got that particular injury at least a couple of days ago.’

  The black eye might—or might not—be connected to the murder, Blackstone thought. Only time would tell.

  He stood up. ‘When you get back to Wapping, have a word with your comrades who were on night duty, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Find out if they saw anything suspicious.’

  ‘I’ll do that, sir,’ Roberts promised.

  Blackstone nodded. He was sure that the sergeant—who seemed a conscientious officer—would make every effort to follow his instructions. But though he had made the request himself, the Inspector doubted that Roberts’ inquiries would turn up anything remotely useful—because he already had the feeling that this was a crime in which nothing would come easy.

  *

  There were inspectors attached to the Yard who took a hansom cab to travel a few hundred yards, but Blackstone was not one of them. There had been no money for cabs when he’d been growing up—no money for much of anything—and walking had become a habit. Besides, walking helped him to think—and just at that moment, he had a lot on his mind.

  Investigating the average murder—the slaying of a costermonger, for example—was easy. You found out who the man’s business rivals were, and which of them he’d come to blows with recently. Then you went to the rival’s local pub—where you would inevitably finding him drunk—and within five minutes the man would be sobbing that he ‘’adn’t meant to kill ol’ Charlie,’ and ‘I don’t know what come over me.’ Wives killed by husbands, husbands killed by wives, prostitutes murdered by their pimps as a lesson to the other girls in the stable—these were all commonplace slayings, with a simple, brutal logic to them that surprised nobody.

  But occasionally there was a murder that was different. Blackstone remembered a few of those he’d solved. The case of the Canadian wool importer, whose body had turned up in instalments—the torso in the left luggage facility at Victoria railway station, the hands in King’s Cross, the head at Euston. The murder of the money lender who had lain in a steamer trunk in Scotland Yard’s own lost property office until the smell had alerted the duty constables that something was wrong. And then, of course, the London Bridge Murder, in which a famous racing jockey had been found hanging from a gas mantle. Yes, they had all been challenging cases in their way. But he had already begun to suspect that none of them had been as challenging as this one would be, because this one threatened to take him into a world of big houses and fine carriages—a world of which he knew almost nothing.

  He had reached the Embankment, and stopped to look at the workmen who were busy stringing bunting between the lampposts. Blackstone gazed at the row after row of vivid red, white and blue Union Jacks, hanging there in homage to the little woman who had sat on the English throne for sixty long years.

  How many of her subjects could remember her coronation? he wondered. He would have been surprised to find that there were more than a few thousand in the whole country.

  The workmen stepped back to inspect the bunting, then moved their ladder on to the next lamp standard. It was still over a week to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebration, but already London was in a state of frenzy. What would it be like when the great day actually came—and the population of what was already a great and vast city had swollen to three times its normal size?

  Blackstone turned to look at the river. As always, it was teeming with activity. Lighters were making their way downstream. Tugs, pulling a convoy of barges behind them like mother ducks with their young, were chugging towards the Pool of London. There were steamers that had travelled all the way from the Far East and tall sailing ships from Holland. The Thames was the heart of the city—and without that heart, London would die.

  The Inspector focused his attention on one of many small dramas being acted out in the river. A steamer was anchored there, dwarfing the lighter moored next to it. A chute connected the two boats, and down that chute rolled chunks of granite. The men armed with rakes who stood on the lighter—trimmers, they were called—had the job of spreading the rock evenly across the deck. It was dangerous work because—time being money—granite continued to spew from the chute as they worked. The trimmers were forced to dodge and spread, spread and dodge. Accidents were common, and a man involved in one would consider himself lucky if he got away with no more than a broken leg or a few crushed ribs.

  The lighter Blackstone was watching had completed its task, and began to move away towards the warehouses on Tooley Street. Immediately, another craft took its place, and more trimmers began the elaborate dance they hoped would save them from an early end.

  He was going to have to be a bit like a trimmer himself on this case, the Inspector thought—because if he offended any of the people of quality who were dragged into it, they could crush him as surely as the granite boulders could crush the men on the lighter.

  Two

  An army of thick, black clouds hung menacingly over the river, but still the workmen continued to string their bunting between the lampposts along the Embankment. How many flags had they already put up? Blackstone wondered. A thousand, at least. And this wasn’t even on the Queen’s route. The whole city seemed to have been swept up in the euphoria of the Jubilee celebrations.

  The Inspector ran his hand over his chin, feeling the stubble that was already in evidence despite his morning shave. ‘We should have heard something about the body by now,’ he said.


  ‘It’s early days yet, sir,’ replied a voice behind him.

  Yes, Blackstone agreed silently, under normal circumstances the forty-eight hours that had elapsed since Sergeant Roberts had pulled the body out of the river would indeed have qualified as ‘early days’. It was often weeks—or even months—before a corpse found floating in the Thames was identified. Sometimes no one ever claimed it, and it went to a pauper’s grave unmourned. But this was not some raddled prostitute or casual labourer with work-hardened hands who’d been drowned. This was a rich man. And the disappearance of such people simply didn’t go unnoticed.

  ‘Maybe he was a foreigner,’ the voice behind him continued. ‘A Yank or a German over here for the Jubilee. It could be quite a while before the relatives back home start getting suspicious.’

  Blackstone turned round to face Sergeant Patterson, and, as always, was mildly surprised by the pleasant—almost boyish—face of the hard-bitten officer who was his right-hand man.

  ‘You really think a rich German or American visitor would go to all the trouble of disguising himself as an East Ender?’ he asked. ‘What would be the point of that?’

  Patterson shrugged. ‘Never can tell how foreigners will act,’ he said. ‘I mean, they’re not like us, are they?’

  ‘And what makes them so different?’

  ‘Well, for a start, they’re jealous of us.’

  ‘Are they?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘Course they are—because we belong to the greatest nation on earth and they don’t.’

  Blackstone grinned at his assistant’s crude jingoism. But then, he reminded himself, Patterson was far from unique. At the centre of the great British Empire it was hard to find any man, from the lowest to the loftiest, who didn’t think that his country soared high over every other in the world. He reflected, not for the first time, on the irony of the fact that though he did not share the British Imperial dream—though, indeed, it had robbed him of his father—he himself had done so much more to advance it than any of these people who seemed willing to sing ‘Rule Britannia’ at the drop of a hat.

  ‘I don’t think he is a foreigner,’ the Inspector said, as much to himself as to Patterson.

  The sergeant ran his right hand through his carrot-coloured hair. ‘What makes you say that, sir?’ he asked. ‘Instinct?’

  In a way, Blackstone supposed it was. But it was not the usual kind of instinct—the imaginative leap in the face of the facts. This time it was closer to home, a feeling that the man had to be English or his death would not have induced this feeling of personal danger the Inspector was experiencing now.

  A loud knock on the door snapped Blackstone out of his reverie. ‘Yes?’ he said.

  The door swung open, and he saw a uniformed sergeant standing there. ‘Yer’ve got a visitor, sir,’ the officer said.

  Once more, Blackstone got a flash of walking the tightrope—or of avoiding the fallen granite. ‘What kind of visitor?’ he asked.

  ‘A young lady. Says it’s on a matter of the utmost importance.’

  ‘Then you’d better show her up,’ Blackstone said, as his gut turned over once more.

  The lady with the urgent business was wearing a spotted silk dress with puff sleeves, and a wide-brimmed hat decorated with lace. Her hands were gloved, and she carried a stylish leather bag that would have cost Blackstone several weeks’ pay. There could be absolutely no doubt that she came from the same class as the dead man.

  She didn’t seem comfortable with her surroundings. In fact, she looked around the room as if she was expecting a trap, and was ready, once she had spotted exactly where it lay, to flee like a frightened doe.

  ‘Sit down, madam,’ Blackstone said, indicating the chair in front of his desk.

  The lady gathered her skirts and sat. She was scarcely more than a girl, Blackstone thought, taking the seat opposite hers. Twenty or twenty-one at the most. She had blonde hair that curled out from beneath her hat, a pale delicate skin, and blue eyes, which were probably extremely attractive when they were not filled with unease.

  ‘I’ve...I’ve come about your advertisement in the newspaper.’

  ‘Which advertisement would that be, madam?’ Blackstone asked.

  The girl opened her bag and took out a folded piece of newspaper.

  ‘Anyone having information concerning a young man of genteel background whose body was discovered in the Thames on Monday last should contact Inspector Blackstone at New Scotland Yard,’ she read aloud.

  ‘And you think you might have such information?’

  The woman glanced down at her lap. ‘Yes. Yes I do,’ she said in a voice so faint that the Inspector had to strain to hear it.

  Blackstone reached for a pen and dipped it in the inkwell. ‘I shall need your name,’ he said.

  The very idea seemed to come as a shock to the young lady. ‘Is that really necessary?’ she asked, her voice now much higher—and bordering on panic. ‘Couldn’t I just examine the body and see if it’s anyone I know?’

  It was possible that she might just be one of those people who take a ghoulish interest in murder but, looking at her sensitive features, Blackstone didn’t think it was likely.

  ‘If anyone should examine the body, then I think it should be a male acquaintance,’ he said. ‘But before we can get to that point, I really do need your name. Is there a reason why you’re so unwilling to give it to me?’

  The young lady bit her lower lip. ‘My...my father doesn’t know I’m here,’ she confessed. ‘He’d be very angry if he knew I’d come.’

  ‘There’s no reason he should ever find out,’ Blackstone assured her. ‘And I still need your name before we can go any further.’

  The young lady hesitated. ‘It’s Emily Montcliffe,’ she said finally. ‘My...my father is Earl Montcliffe.’

  So it was going to be every bit as bad as he’d suspected it might, Blackstone thought.

  He cleared his throat. ‘This young man...?’ he began.

  ‘I think he may be my brother Charles.’

  ‘And why would you come to that conclusion?’

  ‘Because Charles has been...missing...for the last three days.’

  Blackstone scratched his large nose thoughtfully. ‘So why have you waited so long to come forward?’ he wondered aloud.

  Though she should have been expecting it, the question seemed to confuse Lady Emily.

  ‘Charles is often away for the evening,’ she confessed.

  ‘You mean he often goes out in the evening?’

  Lady Emily shook her head. ‘No, I mean there are nights when he doesn’t come home at all. He’s managed to hide it from the rest of the family, but—’ she smiled nostalgically—‘he’s never been able to keep any secrets from me.’

  ‘And do you have any idea where he goes when he stays out?’

  Lady Emily shook her head, though without total conviction.

  ‘You’re sure?’ the Inspector insisted.

  ‘I’ve...I’ve been going through his pockets before his valet’s had a chance to deal with them,’ she admitted. ‘Do you think that’s a terrible thing to do?’

  ‘Not if the motive is sisterly concern. What have you discovered through your searches?’

  ‘Once there was a programme from a vulgar music hall, and on another occasion I found a map. Not a proper one, it was drawn in pencil on a brown paper bag. I can’t remember what they’re called.’

  ‘A sketch map,’ Patterson supplied.

  ‘That’s right,’ Lady Emily agreed. ‘A sketch map.’

  ‘And what area did this sketch map cover?’ Blackstone asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You mean there were no names written on it?’

  ‘There were names, yes. At least, I think they were names.’

  Blackstone arched his thick brows. ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

  ‘Something was scribbled along the sides of the streets. It could have been a kind of writing, but, then ag
ain, it could just have been squiggles.’

  ‘You’re not making sense,’ the Inspector told her.

  Lady Emily shrugged helplessly. ‘I...the squiggles looked like they might be letters—one of them was an R written backwards—but I’ve never seen anything like them before.’

  Perhaps it was a code, Blackstone thought. Perhaps it was some exotic foreign language. Or maybe it was nothing more than squiggles.

  ‘Do you have this sketch map now?’ he asked.

  Lady Emily shook her head. ‘I didn’t dare keep it, in case Charles wondered where it had gone. You see, I didn’t want to make him angry.’

  ‘Is he subject to fits of temper?’

  Lady Emily looked shocked. ‘Oh no, he’s the sweetest, gentlest soul alive. But even so...’

  Even so, none of us like to have our private lives investigated, Blackstone thought. Especially when we’re involved in something we’re ashamed of.

  And that was the conclusion he was rapidly coming to—that the dead man, whoever he was, did have something to be ashamed of. Nothing else would square up to the facts and explain what a young man of quality had been doing getting himself killed in one of the poorer parts of London.

  It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a gentleman had gone into the slums in search of a bit of rough. The Ripper investigation had opened that particular can of worms, and uncovered scores of such men. Doctors and lawyers, pillars of respectable society, had been forced, in order to avoid having suspicion for the murders fall on them, to confess to visiting the commonest brothels. There’d even been the suggestion that one of the Royal Family—the Queen’s grandson—had been seeking his pleasure in this disgusting manner.

  Blackstone sighed inwardly. Would all the murders he investigated end up with sordid motives? he pondered. Would he ever be involved in a case in which the victim died for a noble purpose?

  He turned his attention back to his visitor. ‘For how long has your brother been in the habit of disappearing?’