Doktor Glass (9 page)

Yes, Sister Wright was strong. Of that Langton had no doubt.

He topped up the stove with coal and left his office, which still bore faint odors of Sister Wright’s scent, the memory of white flowers. He
found Forbes Paterson’s room empty; a detective in the main office told him that Paterson would return that afternoon. Langton left a message and decided to follow McBride out to Bootle.

A Victoria Street tram took him from the city center, along Scotland Road and Stanley Road. Langton sat on the top deck among the smells of wet cloth, leather, and arcing electricity from the flexing pantograph above him. He watched the streets unfurl through smudged windows. Even though the royal procession would pass nowhere near this area, many of the houses and shops bore bunting and streamers; empire flags hung from windows next to special commemorative duotones issued by the popular newssheets, so that Queen Victoria’s severe gaze watched Langton from a hundred or more vantage points.

The poorer streets seemed the most fervent; as the tram waited outside Stanley Hospital, Langton looked down the flower-themed roads opposite—Holly Street, Daisy, Rose, Ivy—and saw garlands of red, white, and blue strung between the houses. As the tram pulled away with a lurch and a crackling hiss of sparks, he saw men on ladders affixing more streamers to the gas lampposts.

Then, lulled by the soporific motion of the tram, Langton half-closed his eyes and drifted away. Images formed in his mind: the faceless man, Professor Caldwell Chivers, the mad leap over the dock gates, Sister Wright unfastening the jet buttons. Sarah.

He awoke as the tram jolted to a stop. He looked around, blinking in confusion, and recognized Trinity Church on Merton Road. He clattered down the spiral steps of the tram and jumped onto the cobbles as the conductor rang the bell. Still drowsy, Langton walked up toward the church; if he remembered correctly, Gloucester and Worcester roads lay to the left.

Most of his fellow pedestrians were reasonably well dressed, their clothes clean and pressed if a little worn. Mainly working-class families occupied the simple two-up, two-down terrace houses, which represented a foothold on the ladder of respectability. Langton’s own grandfather had lived in Worcester Road until his determination and
hard work in engineering had lifted his family to Everton Brow and beyond.

Langton found Durham and Kepler’s address on Gloucester Road and saw a police hansom waiting outside. A sinewy woman in a blue apron opened the front door and pointed Langton upstairs, where McBride and another constable rummaged through clothes laid out on a narrow bed; two beds’ legs stood in small pots of kerosene, to stop cockroaches from climbing up them in the night. The smell of the viscous fuel mixed with the smells of damp plaster and tobacco.

“Any luck, Sergeant?”

“Some, sir.” McBride led him to an oak chest of drawers in the corner. Laid out on the top were two General Post Office telegram pads, each with less than half of their blank forms remaining; stubs of train tickets for the Liverpool–Southport overhead electric railway, and for the Great Western line to London Euston; copies of the
Liverpool Echo
going back four days; assorted pens and pencils.

Langton picked up the blank telegram forms and crossed to the window. Enough light came through the dusty glass to reveal indentations on the pads’ surfaces. “We should be able to decipher the last message, back at the station. But people sometimes make mistakes when they compose a telegram; they rip out a page and start afresh.”

McBride grinned. “I’ve got Constable Naylor going through the landlady’s rubbish in the backyard, sir. The corporation dustmen don’t come until tomorrow, so we’ve the best part of a week’s offerings to sort through.”

Langton didn’t envy the constable his task, but he’d had to perform similar duties, if not worse, at the start of his own career. He looked around the room and tried to picture the men living there. Two narrow beds of pine, with chamber pots beneath and worn quilts on top. A washstand with a white china jug and bowl, both covered in fine cracks like spiders’ webs. Floorboards dark with wax and age, with a threadbare rug of red and yellow in the center. Behind the door, fixed to the
yellowing wallpaper with a brass tack, a framed embroidery typical of those produced by young girls as they learned to sew:
Be Thankful Unto The Lord.

The room did not encourage much thought of gratitude, but many lived in conditions far worse than these. Far worse.

“Has the landlady much to say of her lodgers?” Langton asked.

McBride shrugged. “Said they were quiet, sir. Kept themselves to themselves, caused no trouble. The only complaint she had was the hours they kept.”

“How so?”

“Well, sir, they sometimes came in three or four in the morning, and this is when they was on their day shifts and had to be up early. Stinking of ale, too, she said, although they never seemed drunk. Neighbors complained, as neighbors do. Got so she was about to throw them out, but they offered to pay a shilling each extra a week. Seems that made her a bit more tolerant.”

So the two men had joined on the same date, lived in the same house, worked in identical jobs although on different shifts. One had been murdered, the other had fled. No doubt Chief Inspector Purcell would jump to the obvious conclusion, that Durham killed Kepler. And motive? That would no doubt appear as the case unfolded.

Langton mistrusted the obvious. “Did the landlady see any visitors? Any letters or telegrams?”

“Nobody called on them, sir, but they had more than a few telegrams, she said. Sometimes one a day.”

Before Langton could ask more, the stairs echoed to the heavy tread of boots. Another constable appeared, saw Langton, and saluted. He carried a sheaf of stained papers. “Sir, I found these in the rubbish.”

The crumpled yellow telegrams bore questionable and pungent stains but were still legible. Langton spread them out on the top of the chest of drawers. Optimistically, he’d hoped to find some of the
telegrams received by Durham and Kepler; instead, the pages seemed to be unsent drafts prepared by the men. Some of the words had been crossed out and rewritten, or moved to another position.

The contents seemed banal:
Aunt Agnes well. Fever gone. Hopes to visit soon. Asks for news of Mother.

Another:
Uncle Toby pleased with gift. Sends best. Weather bright but unsettled.

McBride shook his head. “Just family gossip, sir. Boring.”

Langton compared the different drafts of the messages. A penny a word soon added up, especially for men on poor wages, but whoever had composed the telegrams had gone to ridiculous lengths to get the text in a certain order.

He smiled. If he were a Boer plotting something, he’d take care with his communications. A straightforward code would result in gibberish being transmitted, and the GPO clerks always notified the police of any suspicious transmission. Family news would arouse no suspicions or queries.

“Sergeant, find the nearest post offices and check their ledgers against these serial numbers; obviously, we’re looking for ones in the sequence. Find out the destination address. We need to know who Durham and Kepler were in contact with.”

“Sir.” Instead of taking the crumpled pages, McBride began noting down the serial numbers imprinted at the top of each sheet.

Langton let Naylor go downstairs to use soap and water and told the other constable to wait outside for a few minutes. Langton wanted to think for a while, to absorb the surroundings and the discovered facts. He sat on the edge of the bed beneath the window and looked around. The smell of boiling cabbage and wet laundry wafted up from below and mixed with the kerosene from the cockroach traps.

Was there really a Boer plot afoot? Langton had some difficulty believing it. Queen Victoria had the best protection in the empire, from what most agreed were the best soldiers, the best agents, the best
network of informants. Still, even they could not give guarantees; everybody had an Achilles’ heel. Durham had to be caught.

A scratching sound distracted Langton. He looked down and drew his legs up as a fat, glossy cockroach scurried from under the bed. It veered away from the kerosene pots and dashed across the threadbare rug, its legs silent until they rattled on bare floorboards again. The insect vanished under the chest of drawers.

Langton got up and made for the door. Where you saw one of the creatures, you knew there were many more; they never traveled alone. Then, as he opened the door, he heard the snap of sprung metal slamming shut. He paused. It had sounded like a mantrap, not some penny arcade device.

Slowly, carefully, he knelt down and looked under the chest of drawers. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a massive steel trap with the unlucky insect spiked and still wriggling. And behind that, a dark void in the wall. Langton shifted the heavy chest to one side and kicked the steel trap out of the way. At the foot of the wall, just above the skirting board, someone had peeled back the yellowing wallpaper and enlarged a hole in the plaster. The wooden square covering the hole lay on the floor beside the trap, probably dislodged by the curious insects.

Pulling on his gloves, Langton used one of the lengths of wooden kindling from beside the fire to delve into the hole. Three more insects spilled out and lay wriggling on their backs. Langton grimaced, then dug a little deeper. The hole was bigger than he had first thought.

A wad of paper tied with twine landed beside the insects. Langton saw ornate writing, watermarks, detailed etchings. He estimated at least two or three hundred pounds in bills of one, five, and ten. He knelt down and searched further. The kindling stick snagged on something; Langton moved back a little, then prized the object out. The cotton-wrapped bundle hit the floor with a metallic thud.

Inside the bundle, a revolver, heavy and black, slick with oil. A Webley, the same model as the force-issue weapon lying in Langton’s
bedside drawer. No doubt the same model that Durham had used to fire on McBride and Langton.

There was something about the brass cartridges as they clattered across the floorboards. Langton took one to the grimy window and held it to the light. The head of the bullet bore two incisions at right angles, a cross-shaped cut that meant the fired round would mushroom on impact. A simple modification outlawed by the Geneva Convention but still in use.

Although the Boer guerrillas and Irregulars were not the only soldiers to use dumdum bullets, Langton remembered clearly the last time he’d seen the ammunition’s horrific effects: Transvaal.

B
EFORE HE LEFT
the house in Gloucester Road, Langton and the constables checked the remainder of the room but found no more cubbyholes or compartments. The landlady, after ignoring the cockroaches and complaining about the hole in her wall (“And who’s going to pay for that, I’d like to know?”), told Langton little more than she’d told McBride: The two lodgers had caused no trouble apart from coming home late; they’d had no visitors but a lot of telegrams and post. No, she couldn’t remember the postmarks on the envelopes, and what did they take her for? A busybody?

Langton stood on the pavement outside the house as McBride made his way through the gaggle of children that played out in the street despite the cold. The bundle of notes and the revolver lay locked in the hansom’s trunk. Langton waited until he and McBride had climbed into the cab before he said, “What did you find?”

McBride flicked through his notebook. “Busy little bees, our two lodgers were. They sent at least one telegram every day, usually to the
same address. The GPO clerk showed me the ledger that him and the operators use to record everything.”

Langton read the notebook page that McBride held open. “Fifty-seven, The Mall, W1. I’m sure I know that address.”

“I was going to look it up, sir, but the clerk had a quicker way; they have a directory they use for the telephones and suchlike. Turns out that address belongs to a government department: Foreign and Commonwealth Office.”

Langton remembered that he’d seen a similar address on the telegram that Doctor Fry had received, the one stating that the faceless man’s fingerprints did not match any records. What connection did Durham and Kepler have with the FCO? He had no doubt that Kepler was a Boer; the tattoos proved that. So what kind of convoluted scheme or intrigue had Langton stumbled upon?

He glanced at McBride and considered talking though his suspicions. He decided to wait until he had something more definite. “McBride, when we get back, ask the desk sergeant if he has any news of Durham.”

“Sir.”

As the hansom rattled along Scotland Road, Langton realized that the Kepler case had distracted him from thinking about Sarah’s passing. Torn between the two, he knew that Kepler should be his priority, yet the thought of Sarah alone and trapped and in the power of some collector…No, he had to be wrong. Here in the cold reality of daylight, with trams and carts crowding the streets and pedestrians bustling every way, the idea of the Jar Boys and Doktor Glass seemed like a bad dream. A fiction.

Yet that suspicion would not leave Langton: Sarah waited for him to release her.

Redfers would know. He had stayed with Sarah until the very end. Nobody could have troubled Sarah without his knowledge, and Sarah had trusted Redfers, the man who had looked after her own mother, father, sisters.

As the hansom drew into the headquarters courtyard, Langton ran up the steps and made for the detectives’ room. Before he could find Forbes Paterson, he met Chief Inspector Purcell coming down the wide staircase. “Ah, Langton. I wondered when we might track you down.”

“If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’m a little busy—”

Purcell blocked his path. “I’m sure it can wait. My office, Inspector.”

Langton bit back his reply and followed Purcell. As Purcell opened the door to his office, he said, “I want to introduce Major Fallows from the Home Office. He’s closely involved with the safety of Her Majesty’s visit.”

A tall, elegantly dressed man stood at the window. He turned and nodded to Langton but didn’t offer to shake hands. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t mention my work so publicly, Purcell. We must retain some confidentiality, after all.”