Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (16 page)

They paused at a fork in the tunnels. Lyall pulled a rolled paper from his coat pocket and unfurled it; Smith glanced at what appeared to be a map of this strange subterranean world. “Left,” said Lyall, then as they moved on said, “Fact is, we tend to keep more than we sell, these days. Inveterate collectors, Mr. Tait and I. Can’t bear to part with some of our finds.”

The tunnel they had taken widened, and the ledge grew progressively wider, for which Smith was thankful. Tait removed a pocket watch from his waistcoat and inspected it. “Lunchtime, Mr. Lyall.”

“Can’t that wait until we get out of here?” said Smith.

“Oh, don’t be in a rush to get up top, Smith,” said Tait. “It was snowing something vicious, last time I looked. No snow down here, no rain neither.”

Both men climbed up onto the ledge, slipping the packs from their shoulders. As Lyall began to unpack pans and a small oilstove from his, Tait held up his lamp and squinted down the tunnel. “That’s most curious, Mr. Lyall. What do you make of it?”

Smith followed the tall man’s pointing finger. There was what seemed to be a doorway in the opposite ledge some distance along the tunnel, but the closer he looked the more he realized the brickwork had been smashed through to create an opening. Lyall left his stove to consult the map in the light from the oil lamp.

“Curious indeed, Mr. Tait. It seems to be a proper tunnel, but bricked up at some point. It isn’t on the map. Perhaps a service tunnel, or a sewer that wasn’t needed.”

“I’m sure I didn’t see it last time we passed this way. What was it, a week ago, perhaps?”

“Yes, a week ago. If it’s Monday we’re here, Tuesday over Holborn, Wednesday under Tottenham Court Road, Thursday up at Highgate … regular as clockwork, ain’t we, Mr. Tait?”

“You have to follow a routine, Mr. Lyall. A schedule. Country’d be off to hell in a handbasket if people didn’t have routines and schedules. Yes, regular as clockwork, we are.”

Lyall turned his attention to lighting the small stove. Smith caught Tait glancing at him with interest. The tall man said, “How did you come to be climbing down here, Smith?”

“I was … escaping.”

“Escaping? Escaping what? Or whom?”

“A mob,” said Smith. “The police.”

“Ah,” said Lyall, looking up. “A wrong ’un!”

Tait caught Smith’s perturbed look and said, “Don’t fret, Smith, we’re not about to hand you in to the authorities, whatever you’ve done. What happens on the surface stays on the surface. We’re not interested.”

“Just like what happens down here stays down here,” said Lyall, eventually lighting the oilstove with his matches. “Ah. Lovely.”

“What are you eating?” asked Smith. His stomach ached with hunger, but the thought of eating one of those rats, whether it tasted of chicken or not, forced his appetite to flee.

“You’ll have a sweetheart who’ll be missing you, a fine, strong, handsome lad like you,” said Tait.

An image of that prostitute’s face—Lottie’s face—flitted through his mind. There was something about that girl, something he couldn’t let go of … but it was ridiculous. Men didn’t fall in love with prostitutes, not at first glance.

“No,” he said, though not sounding convinced even to himself. “No sweetheart.”

“Family?”

There was an aching hole inside him at the thought of
family
. “No, no family.”

There was a moment’s silence in the sewer, save for the distant splashing of rats and the sluggish flow of the river of muck. Smith glanced from Tait to Lyall. Both were looking at him most curiously.

“No sweetheart,” said Lyall.

“No family,” said Tait.

“A wrong ’un running from the police.”

Lyall reached into his bag and withdrew something that glinted in the lamplight, a long-bladed butcher’s knife.

“No one to miss him at all,” said Tait. “We’d be doing society a favor, Mr. Lyall. A valuable service we perform.”

Lyall grinned unpleasantly and hefted the knife as Tait suddenly grabbed Smith by the scruff of the neck, the tall man’s thin fingers exerting an unexpectedly ironlike grip.

“Lunchtime,” said Lyall, his eyes shining, and licked his lips.

Then a deafening roar rent the thick air in the tunnel.

*   *   *

“Now what do you suppose
that
was, Mr. Tait?” said Lyall, his eyes narrowed, the carving knife poised in the air. “Have you ever heard the like?”

Tait looked over his shoulder, behind him down the sewer tunnel. “Can’t say as I have, Mr. Lyall.”

“Allegations in the sewers, do you think?”

Tait gave a thin chuckle. “I think you mean
alligators,
Mr. Lyall. And you know as well as I do that those are just stories. Rats, cats, dogs, and snakes. Pigs. A horse, once. But never alligators.”

Another roar echoed around the brick tunnel, and Smith took the opportunity to wriggle free from Tait’s slackening grip, throwing himself back against the curved wall. He rubbed his neck and said, “You were going to
eat
me?”

“We weren’t going to eat you,” corrected Lyall, raising the knife again. “We
are
going to eat you.”

Tait still looked pensive. “That noise, though, Mr. Lyall.…”

Smith aimed a boot at the short man’s arm, and the knife went flying over his shoulder, skittering away into the darkness. He pushed with both hands at the surprised Tait, causing the tall man to splash backward into the effluent, the oil lamp spinning out of his hand.

They were going to
eat
him.

In the dancing rays of the catapulting lamp, he set off into the darkness, down the tunnel that lay in front of them. Behind him, he heard curses from the two men.

“He’s making a break for it, Mr. Lyall!”

“Then I propose we pursue him, Mr. Tait! We can’t let him get to the surface.… He could bring all manner of problems down on us.”

The light was fading behind him, but he heard Tait and Lyall splashing through the muck. They knew the tunnels well, while he was foundering in the dark. Even if he could outpace them, hungry and weak as he was, would he be able to make it to a ladder and force a manhole aside in time?

In the last of the gray gloom from the lamplight, Smith noticed a quick and sudden movement off to his right. He was passing the broken wall the two men had pointed out earlier, and a tiny shape bobbed up and down. A rat?

No, the monkey.

It chattered at him excitedly, waving its arms.

Was it telling him to follow?

He risked a glance back. Tait and Lyall were dim shapes in the corona of the recovered oil lamp, lurching closer. If he could get across before they fully rounded the bend …

Smith jumped down into the cold, thick stream, grimacing as his foot slipped on something slimy. He waded swiftly across to the other ledge and hauled himself up. The monkey jumped up and down then disappeared into the darkness, reappearing a moment later to ensure he was following.

“Stop, Smith, stop!” called a voice behind.

Without a backward glance he clambered through the damaged brickwork into blackness. A tunnel—thankfully dry—led in a gentle downward slope. He felt the sudden weight of the bricks and darkness, suffocatingly thick, but pushed the fear away.

Your fear is a lie,
said the voice from the past again.

Feeling his way along the narrow walls, he followed the chattering of the unseen monkey. A distant voice called, “Smith? You down there?”

Tait and Lyall. He hadn’t fooled them at all. But then another roar—closer, reverberating around his head—sounded from ahead of him. The monkey jumped up and down; he could see it now, in a dim light emanating not from the pursuing toshers but from ahead, where the tunnel was curving to the left. Smith paused, looking back. Was it better to take his chances with Tait and Lyall or face what lay ahead? But then the decision was made for him. Strong hands grabbed him, and he found himself surrounded by three or four figures melting out of the shadows who held him fast and hauled him off his feet and around the corner, into a wide brick-walled room lit by a burning brazier. A man stood with his fists on his hips in the dancing shadows, regarding him with a frown, but Smith barely gave him a glance.

His attention was somewhat diverted by the young tyrannosaur that strained at a thick chain driven into the wall and fixed him with its piercing yellow eyes, opening its vast mouth to display teeth like knives and roaring with uncontained fury.

11

R
EGINA
V
F
ANSHAWE

The crowd on the pavement outside the arched doors of the Central Criminal Court was so big that it was already spilling out into the Strand, much to the annoyance of the steam-omnibus and carriage drivers who were trying to negotiate the busy, slush-filled thoroughfare.
Word got out, then,
thought Aloysius Bent. He had hoped to get to the Old Bailey early and secure a seat, but so had the massed ranks of his former colleagues on a dozen London newspapers, not to mention the aficionados of the adventures in
World Marvels & Wonders
and assorted ghouls, tourists, and
tricoteuses
. Bent checked his pocket watch; it was a shade after nine. Proceedings would get underway in an hour; it was to be hoped that Siddell had been inside for some time, interviewing Rowena. If the lawyer had spent another night on the tiles and awoken late, then it would not only be the Belle of the Airways who would be up on a murder charge today.

“As I live and breathe, Aloysius Bent!” called one of the press men who were jostling behind a wooden barrier, waiting for the ushers to open up and let them into the fine gray stone Gothic building, its spires scraping the underside of a sky that hung low like paving slabs, threatening yet more snow.

“Herbert.” Bent nodded, pushing through the throng until he got to the journalists. As a friend of Rowena he wasn’t guaranteed a seat in court number one any more than the casual observers, but he was still a bona fide member of Her Majesty’s Press, and he was going to pull every string he could.

“How’s life on the penny bloods?” asked another man in a battered derby and flapping collars.

“Tolerable.” Bent nodded.

“Heard you was keeping right highfalutin company these days,” sniffed Herbert, who’d worked for the
Gazette
longer than anyone—much less Herbert himself—cared to remember. “Heroes and the like. Come to slum it with your old chums?”

A man who was even fatter than Bent stuck a pockmarked nose into the conversation. “Nah, he’s thick with the defendant, he is. Rowena Fanshawe. She’s one of his mob.”

Herbert looked at him with interest. “Oh, yes, that’s right. You a witness for the defense, Bent?”

“
Witless
for the defense, more like.” The fat man chuckled. Bent aimed a half-hearted cuff toward his beacon of a nose.

“Eff off out of it, Gargrave, or I’ll have cause to tell your missus just where you spends your time on all those nights you claims to be working late. Unless you’ve already passed her a dose of the clap, and she knows full well.”

Gargrave made a face at him, but he shut up. Bent felt a surge of something he’d almost forgotten, the banter and feeling of belonging that he’d always had with the press pack. He’d spent more days waiting to go into the Old Bailey with this mob than he’d had hot dinners, but not more than he’d had glasses of gin with them afterward. By God, he’d missed it. He asked, “Who’s the judge?”

Herbert looked over his half-moon glasses at the court list in his gloved hand. “The Right Honorable Edwin Stanger.”

Bent groaned. Stanger the Hanger. They said he had his black handkerchief permanently on his lap when sitting at the Old Bailey, couldn’t wait to pass the death sentence. “What about the silk?” They’d definitely be putting up a hot-shit Queen’s Counsel for this one. He crossed his pudgy fingers behind his back. Please let it not be—

“Angus Scullimore,” said Herbert.

“Oh, eff,” said Bent, as the huge doors began to swing inward. Scullimore. As bad as it could be. He ducked under the wooden barrier and melted in with the journalists as they began to file through the porch. Willy Siddell better have had a hearty breakfast, that was all.

*   *   *

Bent crossed the marble floor beneath the huge, vaulted ceiling of the court foyer, weaving between knots of people hanging around the wide doors to each of the individual courtrooms. Rowena Fanshawe, for all her fame, was just one of dozens of defendants who would pass through the Old Bailey today. Justice was a great leveler. Or so they said. Lady Justice, arms outstretched and sword in one hand, scales in the other, providing a handy perch for London’s ragtag pigeons on the dome above their heads, was as fallible and corruptible as any street thug, in Bent’s experience. She wore a blindfold because the law, like love, was supposed to be blind. More like she couldn’t bear to look, half the time.

Outside the shuttered court number one Bent spied Siddell, looking a little more harried than he would have liked. Still, at least he’d dragged himself out of his pit on time. Bent hailed him and pushed through the crowd to the door. There was a handwritten notice slid into a brass frame on the wall:
Regina v Fanshawe
.

“Siddell! Have they brought Rowena over? You been down to see her?”

“Shit, Bent!” said Siddell. He was clad in his robes and held his powdered wig in one hand, running the other through his unruly hair. “I’ve been down in the cells since before dawn.”

“Well? How is she?”

Siddell bit his lip, his eyes roving around the hall. “A little … on edge, Bent. As you’d expect, given the charges laid against her.”

“Out with it, Siddell!” said Bent impatiently. “What are they saying she’s supposed to have done?”

Siddell deposited his wig haphazardly on his mop of curls and retrieved a buff folder from where it was wedged in his armpit. He flicked it open to the first sheet. “Murder, on Saturday night. The victim is one Edward Gaunt, found dead at his home in Kennington. Mean anything to you?”

“Never heard of him. Should I have?”