Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness Read online

  He’d said, ‘Well, since we seem to be quite unable to attract the better class of young man into the ranks of the Metropolitan Police Force, I suppose you’ll have to do. You have your orders, Sergeant. You must carry them out to the best of your ability.’

  And just how far would that ability take him? Patterson wondered. As far as the hallway of the brothel—if he were lucky. He was a policeman, not an actor—handy in a fight, but absolutely hopeless at pretending to be what he wasn’t.

  *

  Mrs Clegg—Walter’s mother—was a lively old woman, with a tongue that fired off words more rapidly than a Maxim machine gun could fire off bullets. After half an hour of her relentless questioning—‘What’s it like living in London?’ ‘Do you see the Queen often?’ I’ve heard they’ve got railways that run underground down there, but that can’t be true, can it?’—Blackstone politely excused himself on the grounds that he needed a breath of fresh air before he went to bed, and set off up the lane towards the humpbacked bridge.

  The lane was bathed in the pale light of an almost-full moon, but there were no street lights—as there would have been in London—to add to the glow, because street lights required gas to burn, gas came through underground pipes, and—in a village where any stretch of ground might give way at any time—gas-filled pipes were too great a danger to even contemplate.

  He reached the crown of the humpbacked bridge. Ahead of him, bathed in the ghostly moonlight, he could see the churchyard where Tom had been laid to rest only hours earlier, and—though he had not seen it coming—he felt a sudden wave of personal failure wash over him.

  Could he have reached Marston any sooner than he had done? he asked himself. And if he had arrived earlier, would he have been able to prevent Tom Yardley’s death?

  He retraced a few of his steps, then took the dog-legged path that led down to the towpath that ran alongside the Trent and Mersey Canal.

  A number of narrowboats had moored close to the bridge for the night. They were, in their own idiosyncratic way, as impressive and intriguing as ocean-going liners and paddle steamers, Blackstone thought, almost whimsically. They were called narrow-boats for a good reason—none of them being more than seven feet wide—but what they lacked in width they made up for in length, and the ones he was looking at were at least seventy feet from bow to stern.

  Through the still night air there came the sound of a horse whinnying softly to itself.

  Blackstone turned in the direction the sound had come from, and saw that there were several horses tethered in a nearby meadow. When morning came, each one would be harnessed up to its owner’s narrowboat and soon they would be gone—plodding slowly and steadily towards their next destination, towing the boat behind them.

  He turned again and took a closer look at the nearest boat. The cabin—which would be the home of the boatman and his entire family—looked to be about ten feet long, and was elaborately decorated with paintings of roses and castles, much as gypsies’ caravans were. Indeed, these people were like gypsies in many respects, Blackstone told himself. They were constantly moving up and down the country, carrying their cargoes along a network of canals that was almost as extensive as the railway network. They shifted coal from Newcastle to the factories in Birmingham, salt from Cheshire to the Liverpool docks—anything and everything that was in one place and needed to be in another.

  Blackstone lit up a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and wondered what Patterson was doing at that moment. And then, suddenly, though he neither heard nor saw anything to arouse his suspicions, he got the distinct impression that he was being watched.

  *

  The house on Waterloo Road was part of a terrace which also contained the embassies of some of Britain’s less prosperous allies and the homes of merchants and traders who had not yet climbed to the very top of their particular commercial tree. From the outside, it gave an appearance of being highly respectable without being overly ostentatious, which was—of course—exactly what the people who were running it would have wanted.

  Patterson climbed the steps to the front door. He lifted his cane, which had a silver knob on the end of it, and knocked.

  Even this simple action made him feel slightly ridiculous, because, though he knew that fashionable young men of his age did carry canes, he’d never been able to understand why they did it—especially canes with a silver knob on the end, for God’s sake!

  The man who answered his knock was tall and broad. He was dressed in a butler’s uniform, but he looked no more at home in this outfit than Patterson did in his, and his broken nose was a much fairer indication than his uniform of how he actually earned his living.

  The ‘butler’ ran his eyes quickly up and down Patterson’s frame, and though his arms remained by his sides, he balled his hands into fists.

  ‘Yes?’ he said contemptuously. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I—I was told there would be young ladies here,’ Patterson said.

  The stutter had been unintentional, but it had the effect of relaxing the bruiser anyway, and his hands unclenched.

  ‘There may—or may not—be young ladies here,’ he said. ‘Why should that matter to you, one way or the other?’

  ‘I’d—I’d rather like to meet one of them,’ Patterson said, and this time the stutter was more art than nature.

  ‘And maybe they’d like to meet you,’ the bouncer conceded, unbending just a little. ‘But before that can happen, I need to see the colour of your money,’ he concluded, his voice hardening again.

  ‘Of—Of course,’ Patterson said, reaching into his pocket and producing a thick wad of banknotes that he had signed out of Scotland Yard less than an hour earlier.

  The bruiser looked duly impressed. ‘Wait here,’ he said, closing the door and retreating down the hallway.

  The next person to open the door was a young, rather unattractive woman in a maid’s uniform.

  ‘If yer’ll foller me, sir, Madam is waitin’ for yer in her parlour,’ she announced.

  Patterson had to suppress the sigh of relief that was attempting to fight its way out of his corpulent frame. ‘It’s very kind of her to spare the time,’ he said.

  Seven

  Madam—or perhaps it would have been more accurate to call her the madam—was a woman in her early fifties. She was wearing a deep-blue velvet dress with a plunging neckline—though her cleavage had been discreetly covered with fine lace—and had about the same amount of make-up on her face as would have been used by the entire cast of a major production in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

  Her parlour was decorated with very heavy red-and-gold wall-paper, and a number of subtly pornographic paintings of half-naked nymphs hung from the picture rail. The air was thick with the smell of perfume. There was a small side table in the corner of the room, but most of the available space was taken up by a series of chaises longues, on one of which ‘Madam’ was reclining.

  ‘Take a seat,’ she said, and Patterson perched himself awkwardly on the edge of a chaise longue some distance from her.

  ‘It’s always a pleasure to be visited by a fine-looking, well-set-up young man like yourself,’ the woman continued, though the expression in her eyes clearly said that she saw him as no more than a fat boy with money in his pocket.

  Patterson cleared his throat, partly because he was still pretending to be nervous—and partly because it was no real pretence at all.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said thickly.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Archibald.’

  ‘Just Archibald? Don’t you have a second name?’

  ‘Not one that I’d be willing to use here.’

  ‘Cautious, aren’t you?’ the madam asked tartly.

  ‘Very,’ Patterson agreed.

  The madam nodded. ‘When you get to know us better, you’ll come to see just how discreet we can be, but for the moment I suppose there’s no harm in you being a little careful.’ She paused for a second. ‘Might I ask you, Archiba
ld, who recommended us to you?’

  ‘No,’ Patterson said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘The person in question would only give me this address if I promised not to use his name.’

  ‘But he has been here himself, has he?’

  ‘So he claims.’

  Madam reached for a feather fan, and wafted it a few times in front of her face.

  ‘Yer not a copper, are yer?’ she asked, with a sudden hard edge—and rough accent—entering her voice.

  ‘Of course not!’ Patterson protested.

  ‘Then what are you?’

  ‘I’m a gentleman.’

  The madam looked at him speculatively. ‘What do you do for a living?’ she demanded.

  Patterson had his top hat on his lap, and now he ran his hands nervously around the rim. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Then where does the full wallet—which my manservant assures me you have in your pocket—come from?’

  Patterson looked down at the floor, as if in embarrassment, and embarked on the story he had prepared in advance.

  ‘My father gives me all the money I need,’ he mumbled.

  ‘And why would he do that?’

  ‘He likes me.’

  ‘He likes you!’ the madam repeated sceptically. ‘And where does his money come from?’

  ‘He owns plantations in the West Indies.’

  ‘Makes his money off the niggers, does he?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘And what about your grandfather? What did he do?’

  ‘We don’t talk about him.’

  ‘Why would that be? Because he was poor?’

  ‘As I said, we don’t talk about him.’

  ‘So your granddad didn’t have a pot to piss in, but you can swan around town like you were the Prince of Wales himself?’

  ‘I—I suppose so,’ Patterson agreed. ‘Though I’m nowhere near as rich as he is.’

  ‘Got a lady-friend?’ the madam demanded, out of the blue.

  Patterson looked flustered. ‘No, I—I find it difficult to talk to any of the young ladies I meet socially.’

  ‘Besides which, none of the ladies you meet socially would ever think of giving you what you really want, now would they?’

  ‘No,’ Patterson agreed, guiltily.

  ‘So what is it you want?’ the madam asked. ‘We’ve got all sorts in here. Fat ones, and ones that are so thin you can hardly see them when they turn sideways. Tall ones and small ones. Black ones and yellow ones. We cater for every taste, and if we haven’t got it now, we can get it for you.’

  ‘I—I like the young ones,’ Patterson mumbled.

  The madam cackled loudly. ‘Do you know, if I’d had to make a wager on it, that’s where I’d have put my money,’ she said. ‘Well, we can certainly provide for your needs if that’s what you’re after. We’ve a lovely young girl upstairs who can’t be more than fourteen, and as soon as she’s finished entertaining her present gentleman caller—’

  ‘I like them untouched,’ Patterson interrupted.

  ‘Untouched? You mean you like them to be virgins?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose I do,’ Patterson admitted.

  ‘And why is that?’ the madam wondered, with a smile playing at the corner of her heavily painted lips.

  ‘There’s no chance of disease that way,’ Patterson said.

  The madam’s smile widened. ‘That’s not it at all, is it?’ she asked. ‘Or, at least, not all of it.’

  ‘I assure you—’

  ‘What you really like is the way they’re all aquiver because they’ve never done it before, and they don’t know quite what to expect. What you really like is the way they cry out in pain when you enter them for the first time. I’m right about that, aren’t I?’

  ‘Perhaps a little right,’ Patterson said.

  ‘Well, that’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ the madam said easily. ‘There’s many a man walking the streets of London with the same desire as yourself. It’s as natural to want a virgin as it is to want a fresh egg. But since they can only lose their cherry once, it does come expensive.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ Patterson told her. ‘I believe it can cost anything up to twenty-five pounds.’

  The madam threw back her head, and laughed loudly. ‘Twenty-five pounds!’ she repeated.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been told.’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose it could cost only twenty-five pounds if you were willing to accept a snotty-nosed ragamuffin who’d just been picked up from the docks. But the pleasure is so much more intense when it’s a better class of girl you’re deflowering—a shopkeeper’s daughter or tradesman’s daughter, for example. That’s the kind of girl we like to offer our gentleman callers here—and that kind of girl will cost you at least fifty pounds.’

  Patterson licked his lips. ‘Can I see her?’ he asked.

  The madam laughed again. ‘It’s not like ordering up towels or linen, you know. We haven’t got a big cupboard upstairs marked “Virgins”.’

  Patterson started to stand up. ‘Then if you haven’t got what I—’ he began.

  ‘Sit down, Archibald,’ the madam ordered. ‘I can get you exactly what you crave—but it might take some time.’

  ‘How long?’

  The madam shrugged. ‘Could have her tomorrow, might take a week or so. You can never tell in these matters. But whenever she gets here, she’ll have been well worth waiting for. All right?’

  Patterson nodded, and sat down again. ‘But how will I know when you’ve got your hands on one?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll tell one of the maids to take a message to your club. Which one is it? The St James’s? White’s? You do have a club, don’t you?’

  Patterson nodded. He did indeed have a club—the Peckham Domino and Whist Club, where he had first met Rose, his fiancée—but that didn’t quite fit in with the role he was currently playing.

  ‘Well, which one is it?’ the madam asked.

  ‘I’d rather not be contacted at my club,’ Patterson said. ‘I’ll give you a telephone number, instead.’

  ‘That would be perfectly acceptable,’ the madam agreed.

  Patterson made a great show of taking a case containing his visiting cards out of his pocket. He opened it, then—as if having second thoughts—snapped it shut again.

  ‘I’ll write the number down for you,’ he said, taking a slip of paper and pencil out of his other jacket pocket. ‘That will be much easier.’

  ‘What you really mean is that not only don’t you want me to know your full name, you don’t even want me to know where I can contact you. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Of course it is, and I’ve already said that I don’t blame you. I didn’t trust you when you first walked in here, did I? But now I’ve got the measure of you, and I do. And in time, when you’ve become a regular customer, you’ll learn to trust me, too, and we’ll develop what’s called a “mutually beneficial relationship”.’

  ‘I’m sure we will,’ Patterson agreed, handing her the slip of paper.

  ‘Is this your home?’ the madam asked, glancing down at the numbers he’d written down.

  No, Patterson thought. Not my home at all. In fact, it’s a special number that the London Telephone Company has just assigned to Scotland Yard, and you’re the only one who can ring it.

  But aloud, he said, ‘It’s a friend’s home.’

  ‘And will you tell this friend of yours to be expecting a call from me?’

  ‘No, I’ll tell him to expect a call from my sister’s dressmaker, about the dress I’m having made for her as a surprise.’

  The madam looked at him with fresh suspicion. ‘You’re not quite as bubble-headed as you seemed when you first walked in here,’ she said.

  Damn, Patterson thought; he’d made the mistake of sounding too much like himself—and too little like the spoiled rich boy with a weakness.

  ‘I’m—I’m not bubble-headed at all,’ he
said, improvising wildly. ‘I just act like an idiot when I’m nervous—and who wouldn’t be nervous in a house of ill-repute?’ He put his hand over his mouth. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that you’re...’

  The madam laughed again. ‘Let’s call a spade a spade,’ she said. ‘This is a house of ill-repute. A whorehouse, if you like. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t, now would you? And now we’ve got any little misunderstandings we might have had out of the way, I’m sure the two us will get on famously.’

  ‘I’m sure we will,’ Patterson agreed, standing again. ‘Well, since we seem to have finished our business for tonight—’

  ‘We haven’t quite finished,’ the madam interrupted. ‘I will have to go to a great deal of expense to obtain the girl you want, and if you don’t turn up, as you’ve promised...’

  ‘If virgins are as rare and prized as you claim they are, you can always sell her to one of your other customers,’ Patterson said.

  He was sounding too clever again, he thought in a panic—too much like a policeman. But fortunately, Madam seemed more interested in defending her own position than examining his.

  ‘It’s true there’ll be a ready market for the girl,’ she agreed, ‘but I’ve taken rather a shine to you, and I’d like you to have her.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Still, as I said, business is business, and I’d feel much happier if you’d leave a deposit, just to show good faith on your part.’ The madam paused for a second, as if assessing how much she thought she could get away with. ‘Shall we say, twenty-five pounds?’ she ventured.

  ‘Why not?’ Patterson agreed, reaching into his pocket for the money that the Home Office had so willingly provided.

  *

  It was a mixture of sympathy and annoyance that finally made Cathy approach the girl huddled in the corner—sympathy because she could still remember how she’d felt herself when first brought to this place, and annoyance because the girl’s sobs were really starting to grate.

  ‘What’s yer name?’ she asked.

  The other girl looked up. ‘Lizzie.’

  ‘An’ I’m Cathy. How did yer get here, Lizzie?’